Boxer is another of the new breed of apps that let you swipe your way through e-mail and get to the Zen state known only as “inbox zero.” Mailbox was arguably the first of these apps – which also let you turn your e-mails into to-dos – but it’s Gmail only and the iPad version sucks. Boxer, née Taskbox (which supports pretty much every e-mail service including vanilla IMAP), has just gotten bumped to v4.0, adding in iPad support and a slew of other welcome extras. It’s also $1 instead of $5 for a while, in way of celebration.
First, Boxer looks great on the iPad, unlike Mailbox which still manages to render your e-mails as if you’re reading them in like windows 95. The new version still lets you swipe left and right to archive, delete, create a to-do or pop open the action panel.
Actions are the main gimmick here, and it’s a good one. From the pop-up panel you can do the usual things like marking spam, archiving or deleting your message, but you can also create a todo, make a quick reply (using a kind of built-in snippet or boilerplate system), “like” the message (which e-mails the sender to tell them you, like, totally dig their message) or – new in v4.0 for iPad and iPhone both – send the message direct to Evernote or Sanebox. I don’t use Sanebox, but Evernote integration lets you pick a source notebook right there in the app.
And this brings me to a rather neat feature in Boxer: smart filing. Whenever you need to pick something from a list, be it an IMAP folder or an Evernote notebook, a few smart options are displayed at the top of the list. These are surprisingly good guesses most of the time, and presumably will get better as I use the app more.
Unlike Mailbox, which uses its own server-side shenanigans to manage all your to-dos and notifications, Boxer uses standard IMAP folders, creating a Boxer folder in your e-mail list and adding Done and To-Do folders inside that. This means you can access these from anywhere, although you don’t get the neat due date and other features that you get if you use the built-in dashboard view. You can also add mails to your to-do list from elsewhere, for instance by using mail rules. This makes Boxer both powerful and future-proof, which I like a lot.
Actually, now that I’ve started using the app, I regret not paying the full $5 for it. Boxer doesn’t integrate directly with all the services on my iPad like Dispatches does, but its fast, reliable (unlike MailPilot) and doesn’t lock you in. What’s not to like? Hell, I might even check out Sanebox because of it.
Source: Get Boxer
