More than 800,000 people are waiting to access a new iPhone app that
aims to transform their email experience by helping them achieve the
elusive "inbox zero" a fully processed and empty inbox.
The Mailbox
app, which launched this month, is slowly rolling out invitations to
people waiting in line. The excitement, according to its creators, is a
testament to their frustration with existing, out-dated methods of
dealing with email.
"The big shift is away from a mobile email
client that is a shrunken version of a desktop email client towards a
mobile email client focused primarily around processing and triage,"
said Gentry Underwood, the CEO and co-founder of Palo-Alto-based company
Orchestra, which created the app.
The ability to "snooze" an
email, which is to defer it to another time, whether later in the day,
on the weekend, or until the following week, is one of the main features
of the app.
"We want to decide 'do I need to reply now', 'can I
deal with this later', or 'should I get it out of the way and never deal
with it again?'" he said.
The other strong point is its use of
gestural swipes for quickly archiving, deleting and filing messages, or
adding them to lists, such as "to read", or "to buy".
The company,
which also created to-do list app Orchestra, pulls inspiration from
author David Allen's "Getting Things Done" system. The system outlines a
rule of "do it, delegate it, defer it, drop it" to help people maintain
empty inboxes.
"That creates a very different experience and peace of mind where you know that everything is in its place," said Underwood.
However,
one problem with this system, according to Underwood, is that it
requires discipline to constantly review folders where tasks are stored
for future reference. To overcome this, the Mailbox app provides push
notifications for emails that have been snoozed on the day when they are
relevant.
"All of a sudden you can have the blissful experience
without developing the ninja-like discipline and that's the secret sauce
behind this more euphoric experience," he said.
The company is
rolling out invitations for the app daily, but cannot provide specific
timelines. The wait, according to Underwood, is in place to maintain
stability of their system, which he said presents more of a challenge
than standard apps.
"Scaling something like an email service is
really hard because it involves handling a lot of data and strange
edge-cases email, file attachments, content in all sorts of languages,"
he added.
In the meantime, a countdown in the app keeps people in line up-to-date on where they stand.
The
app provides many new features over the native iPhone mail app, however
it lacks the ability to multi-edit or multi-delete emails.
While
the app currently only works with Gmail, the company plans to expand to
other types of email and platforms in the future. It is available
worldwide.
© Thomson Reuters 2013