How To Estimate How Long You’ll Have To Wait To Get Into Orchestra’s Mailbox App

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mailbox-app

We’re huge fans of Orchestra’s email inbox management app, Mailbox, here at Cult of Mac. Less popular around here? The extraordinary queue that Orchestra forces you to sit in before they’ll let you into the app.

The reason Orchestra has set it up this way is to prevent demand from crushing their servers, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying (for more info on Orchestra’s rationale, see this article). When we download apps, we expect to be able to use them right away, not sit in a queue for an indeterminate amount of time.

We can’t help you get to the head of the Mailbox queue, but we can tell you roughly how long you’ll have to wait based on how fast Mailbox has let people into the app in the past. Here’s how.

Reader Phillip G. wrote us, telling us he had been tracking how many people on average Mailbox was letting into the app, based upon how many people were ahead of him in the queue. Averaging it out over the course of a few days, Phillip determined that Mailbox’s servers are allowing about 19.5 individuals per minute access to the app.

Consequently, it’s actually pretty easy to estimate how long you’ll have to wait to get into Mailbox:

50,000 — 42.7 hours (1.77 days)
100,000 — 85.4 hours (3.56 days)
200,000 — 170.9 hours (7.08 days)
300,000 — 256.4 hours (10.68 days)
500,000 — 427.3 hours (17.8 days)

Phillip G. points out that “this is only an estimate, as Orchestra has indicated that the rollout will be exponential, but at least this gives a time if rollout is linear.” So don’t set your watch by this estimate. Still, it does make it a little easier to wait if you know it’s only going to be a day or two, instead of a few months.

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