Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Dropbox’s Mailbox finally lands on Android

Long before Dropbox acquired the company last year, Mailbox made a splash when it landed on iOS boasting a new way to handle droves of email. Competitors have taken up the challenge of creating a Mailbox-esque experience for Android but none have quite nailed it the way Mailbox has. Starting today Android users don’t have to settle for alternatives anymore.

Announced on the official Mailbox blog, Mailbox is finally coming to Android. If you aren’t familiar with how Mailbox works, here’s a quick rundown: Mailbox lets you quickly run through a list of emails by swiping them away in a sort of list view that is your inbox. Different types of swipes do different things. For example a long swipe to the right will delete an email, while a short swipe will archive it. A long swipe to the left will snooze an email, to be brought up later. Mailbox now also syncs swiping habits across devices using Dropbox to auto-swipe certain content further cutting down on the time you spend in your inbox.

I’ve used Mailbox extensively in the past and while I can say it is impressively slick, I found it wasn’t the email client for me. I felt like Mailbox was simply pushing my email away to deal with later. If I put some effort into marking emails as read when I don’t need to bother with them and sending short, courteous replies when necessary, Mailbox seems like more work than it’s worth. As a more general concern, if you take a look at Mailbox you’ll notice right away it’s a direct iOS clone, with iOS elements galore. Personal and design problems aside, Mailbox is certainly worth a look if you haven’t used it before. You can download it via the widget below.

(Playboard) | (Play Store)