Mailbox was a

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for t ...

email management application for

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...

and Android, developed by Orchestra, Inc. It drew the attention of numerous technology blogs for its usability and innovative features, such as swipe-based email sorting, snoozing and filtering. Weeks before its launch, a pre-registration period resulted in a waiting list of over 380,000 reservations. Upon its iOS launch on 7 February 2013, Mailbox became the second-most-downloaded free app in the

App Store An App Store (or app marketplace) is a type of digital distribution platform for computer software called applications, often in a mobile context. Apps provide a specific set of functions which, by definition, do not include the running of the c ...

that day. In March 2013, Orchestra was acquired by

Dropbox Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S. that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software. Dropbox was founded in 2007 ...

. The rollout of Mailbox was sped up and the pre-registration period ended in April. In April 2014, Dropbox released Mailbox for Android and announced a public beta version for , which was released in August. In December 2015, Dropbox announced the discontinuation of Mailbox, saying that they were not able to "fundamentally fix email" with it and that they rather focus on " treamliningthe workflows that generate so much email". It was ultimately discontinued on February 26, 2016, as announced earlier.

Features

Mailbox focused on emptying the user's inbox and favored using folders instead of leaving emails in the inbox. For instance, it incentivized the user with visual cues and gestures to organize emails based on priority and due date to empty to inbox. Mailbox was limited to

Gmail Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP and ...

and

iCloud iCloud is a cloud service from Apple Inc. launched on October 12, 2011 as a successor to MobileMe. , the service had an estimated 850 million users, up from 782 million users in 2016. iCloud enables users to sync their data to the cloud, inclu ...

accounts. It also supported

Yahoo! Mail Yahoo! Mail is an email service launched on October 8, 1997, by the American company Yahoo, Inc. The service is free for personal use, with an optional monthly fee for additional features. Business email was previously available with the Yahoo! ...

for three days. Setting up Mailbox required granting the company's servers access to the user's email account, either through APIs (Gmail) or direct access (iCloud). Mailbox's servers repeatedly queried the user's email account to provide push notifications and allowed the application to refresh its content without having to run in the background for prolonged periods.

References

External links

* {{Email clients IOS software Email clients Android (operating system) software MacOS email clients

Features

See also

References

External links