Mailbox for iOS Review

Mailbox by orchestra is a fantastic new app for the iPhone that is sure to replace mail

Sparrow, or Gmail as your email client of choice. The idea behind mailbox is simple

Instead of letting your email fester with unresolved emails, Mailbox encourages you to treat emails in your inbox like items on a to-do list

quickly checking them off in pursuit of that elusive inbox zero. The way mailbox helps you tame your inboxes through a series of simple

gestures that allows you to quickly archive, delete, file, or snooze your emails for dealing with later

By just swiping left or right on any email, you can easily make sure that even while you're away from your main work computer

your inbox remains tidy, fresh, and organized. There's four main gestures you use in mailbox to resolve your email

and they all are done by swiping a finger left to right. The first is archive. Simply swipe halfway to the right and let go to mark an email as read and send it into your Gmail archive to be

be saved indefinitely until the atoms of the eye cloud are sucked into the big crunch at the end of time

Next up, delete for spam and stuff. Just swipe your finger all the way to the right and let go to obliterate that email in the incinerator never to be seen or heard from again Not diverse enough for you You can also swipe left Just swipe along an email halfway to the left and let it go to tell mailbox you want to deal with that email later

Mailbox will then snooze that message and remind you about it at a more convenient time of your choosing

Obviously, this is a fantastic feature for procrastinators. Just watch out for infinitely recurrence

cursive procrastination loops. You can also file into folders by dragging an email all the way to the left

You'll then be given the option of slapping that email into any category that you choose

You can even specify your own custom folders. Here I am awkwardly henpecking away, inputting a cult of Mac folder

Given how much work I choose to ignore each day, I imagine I'll be using this one fairly often

Okay, well we've seen how you file individual emails, but what about in bulk

How do you manage every email in your inbox? Again, Mailbox makes this a really easy proposition

At the bottom of your inbox is a select all row with a number on it representing how many emails you have in it Just drag that row as if it were an email in its own right and you can archive delete file or schedule for later

all of your inbox emails in bulk. Once that's done, you've got yourself an inbox zero. Good for you

Once you're at inbox zero, you get a very simple but nice reward

a graphic representing the mailbox app icon, which is textured with a pretty creative

image that changes daily. I'll be honest. I love reaching inbox zero just so I can see

what image orchestra has knocked up that day. It's a small but very nice metagaming touch

There are other features, of course. Like any iOS email client, you can search your email

and in our experience, mailbox searches your inbox quicker than most. Did you misfile an email? Tap on the hamburger button at the top left corner. Find where you

We misfiled your email, then drag it halfway to the left and let it go to send it hurtling back to your inbox

None the wiser. We were very impressed with the ingenuity of one mailbox setting, app badge count

Knowing that the bloated unread email count on your mail icon can be a depressingly burdensome Scarlet A on your iOS home screen orchestra has given you the option to make your mailbox badge a binary state You either have new email since last time or you have none Select the right option and a badge on the mailbox app icon reading

one will appear if you have new email since you last opened the app. Once you open

mailbox, it goes away again. Another considerate option is the ability to define snoozes

and preferences. You can tell Mailbox not to worry you about emails you've put off until later

before a certain time of morning or after a certain time at night. There are other time-based snooze options as well

There's just loads to like about Mailbox. It's a lightning quick app that makes organizing

your email a breeze, and it actually makes inbox zero attainable for people like me who get hundreds of

emails a day. The truth of the matter is that on an iPhone, dealing with your email is more about

management than anything else. And mailbox is a phenomenal tool to help prevent you from becoming

literally buried under email that is piled up. Mailbox for iPhone is available now from the app store

and it's free. If you do email on your iPhone, download this app now. It's the standard against

which all future iOS email clients will be measured. This is John Brownlee for Cult of Mac

signing off