I think someone mentioned this on the first day of class before, but I had no idea what the app was. That is, until I recently bought into the trend and am finally near the beginning of what was once a 700,000-person wait list.
More than anything, the new Mailbox app seems to be positioning itself as the Messiah of email, saving people from their overloaded inboxes and delivering them to the Promised Land of Inbox Zero. In all fairness, it looks beautiful. I love the swipe interface and the idea of immediately organizing and “snoozing” emails, even before reading them.
It’s interesting to follow the #mailbox trend on Twitter. It’s lots and lots of people talking about the wait list, several people tweeting #inboxzero, and other people deleting the app after being unimpressed. I don’t know what to expect, but I can’t escape the faint hope that this app really could help me to handle email in an clean and stress-free way. And while the wait list is apparently necessary to be able to have push notifications for all Mailbox users, it also serves quite well as a (rather viral!) marketing trend. Is Mailbox the email savior? I’ll have to wait a little longer to decide. But after my month-long commitment to watching my wait list number steadily shrink, I’m willing to suspend disbelief while my anticipation continues to rise.
Current Mailbox number: 42,372
