First look: Mailbox for Mac

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As someone who emails regularly, having a working email client is essential. Over the years I have tried multiple mail clients, from Sparrow on Mac, through a myriad on Windows 8 to Yahoo's mail app on Android.

All have offered solid experiences – the ability to reply, search, place into a folder, and so forth – but none have offered the ability to properly categorise email messages based on one important factor: time.

Time is of the essence

An email assignment from TechRadar may need to be dealt with in a week, by which time the message has disappeared fifty emails down my inbox and requires searching to find, or in the worst case scenario, has been deleted.

An email from a friend received during a working day may need to be replied to in the evening, by which time I have forgotten and have moved onto other matters.

Promotional emails from online stores offering discounts need to be brought back after payday, by which time they have been mercilessly buried. Luckily, Mailbox provides a solution.

First appearing on the iPhone, Mailbox offered an easy way to dismiss emails and have them return at a later date. By swiping one way or another on an email, a message could be hidden until an hour's time, a day's time, a week's time and so on, upon which point it would return to the top of the inbox ready for action.

Dropbox backing

Mailbox, the company, was then snapped up by Dropbox for around $100 million (around £61 million, AU$113 million), offering greater resources but keeping the service separate. Under Dropbox's ownership, Mailbox expanded to include an iPad client, and now, a Mac client which is currently in beta.

The actual visual experience with the Mac software is incredibly close to the Windows 8 mail app, with a clean white interface and sliding effects when anything happens. Unlike the mail app on OS X, which can appear cluttered and busy, Mailbox always looks serene even when emails are pouring in.

When you first sign in – Mailbox only supports iCloud or Google emails, with Yahoo mail support being removed due to a technical issue – all of your emails appear instantly. Sent items synced to the cloud (I signed in with my iCloud email account) swiftly and correctly, as did deleted and archived items.

As I mentioned, the app is still in beta, and has all of the associated instabilities, including refusing to write a new message on multiple occasions. These issues will likely be ironed out in the final release and can be solved by deleting and then reinstalling the app (a process I undertook several times).

Zero priority

Recently, there has been a large movement towards "inbox zero", the idea that people who use email heavily want to reduce their unread email count to zero. Mailbox helps with this goal greatly.

By filing emails away, the number of emails that are left unread reduces rapidly. In the past, I've left emails unread in order to find them again quickly. This solution is far from perfect and is negated by Mailbox.

Now, I simply tell Mailbox to remind me of the email in a few days when I am ready to act upon it. Workflow-wise, Mailbox quickly becomes an essential element and you'll actively start noticing yourself chiding other email apps for not including Mailbox-like features.

To actually get hold of the app, a "beta coin" must be used. Signing up for a beta coin on the Mailbox website took about three or four days to generate one, but a quick search of Twitter offered more results with people actively giving away unused beta coins. The system is novel and prevents novice users from downloading and using Mailbox in its current state.

When I asked Mailbox about their final plans to roll out the service, they said the app would be paid but wouldn't specify how much a single license would cost.

Currently Mailbox integrates rather loosely with Dropbox, with images and files attached to emails in Mailbox being hosted by Dropbox and not much else. Dropbox's infrastructure is likely supporting Mailbox, however – or likely will be soon. Mailbox said in July 2013 that the service was "processing" over 60 million emails a day, a number that could only have gone up.

On launch, Mailbox had to ask customers to wait before gaining access to the service. With Dropbox behind it, this is unlikely to happen again.

Security is paramount

As a company that is becoming increasingly involved in enterprise, and the security concerns that follow, Dropbox will have the infrastructure and talent in place to deal with any security risks associated with Mailbox's rather unorthodox way of dealing with email.

Unlike a regular mail client, which simply serves emails off the server of whichever provider is being used – be it Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. – Mailbox processes all the emails that it delivers to its various clients on its own servers.

Anyone who gained access to the Mailbox servers would then have access to millions upon millions of emails, an unappealing idea especially to the technology-savvy customers who are likely to download Mailbox.

Mailbox offers a new take on email; a view that includes "inbox zero", an idea adopted predominantly by journalists and those who work with heavy amounts of email.

The idea is, essentially, to reduce the total volume of unread, or un-acted-upon, emails in your inbox to zero. Mailbox's time-based categorisation tools allow this, leading some to call it the "inbox zero client".

For most users, however, just being able to file emails away for a later date will be the primary function of Mailbox, and this it does very well.