Mailbox is an email client that made its name in the iOS platform and came into the spotlight when Dropbox acquired it for around $100 million in 2013. Dropbox has promptly put together an app for Android users and made it available on the Play Store for the price of free. If you are not too happy with your current mobile email clients, check out Mailbox. You may be pleasantly surprised.
Mailbox for Android Review
To start using Mailbox, you will first need to download the app from Google Play and sign in using your Dropbox credentials. At present, you can only add Gmail and iCloud accounts but there is a proposal to include Outlook and Yahoo in the coming updates.
Once you sync your respective accounts, you’ll get a interactive guide around the various gesture features of the app. There are four principal swipes. You can swipe to the right to archive email, long swipe right to trash your email, swipe left to snooze an email later so that it returns to your Inbox later at the date and time you pick, and long swipe left to add it to a list.
The Inbox is clean and intuitive. It displays navigation buttons at the top: the Menu list at the top left; the Later, Inbox, and Archive buttons at the top center; and the Compose button at the top right.
All the features of the app sit nicely and you’ll feel at home with the app right away. Similarly dealing with an email message is also pretty convenient. You can use the nav buttons at the top to deal with the open email, or you can reply, replay to all and forward to the email using the buttons at the bottom of the email.
Mailbox’s standout feature is the AutoSwipe, a feature that automatically analyzes your user behavior and automates your frequent actions such as archiving email from certain recipients or adding specific email to lists. You can also manually set options to archive, list or trash email messages. Just open up an email, long press the respective buttons on the Nav bar, and you’ll see the option to auto-swipe it.
Because of the integration with Dropbox, you’ll see that you can attach docs and photos that are in Dropbox cloud storage to any email messages you send out. However you cannot attach files from anywhere else. Also, downloading an attachment is a problem and Mailbox needs a bit of work done in that department to make things more intuitive.
One of the features that I use a lot of with any email client is marking mails as read. Although that feature is missing in the app, Mailbox makes it dead easy to maintain a zero Inbox. In a few seconds of left and right swiping you can organize all your email messages and clear up your Inbox.
Another feature that I sorely miss is the bulk action option. If you have a lot of unchecked email messages in your Inbox as may happen sometimes, you may not appreciate the fact that you have to swipe that many times to clear up the Inbox. A simple bulk action option should allow you to complete the job in just two taps.
On the Plus side, you have a nice search feature and the Later feature that lets you rid yourself of an email from an Inbox only to have it sent back again at a time of your choice.
Although you won’t be in any hurry to throw away your current email client, Mailbox is only going to get better with time and is definitely worth checking out.
Download Mailbox for Android (Price: Free)
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