Mailbox, the popular iPhone mail app, is now rolling out on the Mac. Mailbox
When Mailbox came out for the iPhone, people were so excited about its novel mail-sorting features that they lined up like it was a hot new nightclub to try it out. Now its coming to desktop, with beta invites trickling out to users starting today.
The idea behind Mailbox is simple: Most of us treat our inbox like a to-do list, so why not use an app designed to accommodate that behavior? The mobile version of Mailbox was built on a handful of features that made triage easy and put inbox zero actually in reach. You could swipe emails to sort them into folders or “snooze” them until later. After getting snapped up by Dropbox, Mailbox introduced a feature called Auto-swipe that intelligently learned when and where you sorted certain messages and subsequently took care of it for you automatically.
You can now sort messages to the desktop app from your phone, or vice versa. Mailbox
The desktop version of Mailbox is built on many of these same features. It’s got a spartan, all-white look with a familiar three-pane interface. You can sort emails by swiping them with your trackpad, just like you do on the mobile app. Power sorters are given a few new tools. Holding down the “CMD” key cleverly reveals hotkeys for sorting via keyboard, and selecting multiple items in the inbox lets you swipe them all at once, a satisfying mass-sort that design lead Tony DeVincenzi likens to “hitting your mail with a baseball bat.”
DeVincenzi points out that the team didn’t just grab the swipe feature from the mobile app and call it a day. Instead, they tested dozens of new interactions for sorting mail with keyboard and trackpad, including slapping big buttons on each message and hiding sorting options in expanding, mouse-over menus. Ultimately though the designers wound up back at swipe as the most natural way to organize. But they did tweak the interaction so that it felt natural on the desktop. “On mobile, it’s mapped one-to-one with your thumb,” DeVincenzi says. “It feels like a physical affordance.” To fine-tune the feel on the desktop, the designers built a UI panel that let them play with properties like tension, bounce-back, velocity and spring. (This whole thing is kind of interesting. For decades, desktop mail clients have been built on keyboard-and-mouse interactions. Here instead we have one built for keyboard and trackpad. It’s a surefooted break from the click-and-drag tradition and an embrace of our current Age of Swiping).
Some of the most interesting features in the desktop app are new sorting options that let you organize mail based on whatever device you happen to be holding at the moment. On your phone, you can sort a message in Mailbox so that it only pops back up when you next open Mailbox on your desktop, or vice versa. If you’re one of those people who routinely mark things as unread on the go so you can deal with them at your computer, you’ll understand how useful this could be, but, more broadly, it’s an interesting example of the possibilities that open up when your mail app becomes a mail platform—a space Mailbox will continue explore in future updates. “Now that we have Mailbox on all the main screens, we can start doing creative things in the ecosystem,” DeVincenzi says.
The compose window was based on an 8.5 x 11″ sheet of paper. The slender form wraps text lines faster, making it feel easier to fire off notes. Mailbox
There are a few other new details worth pointing out. One is the compose window, which pops up in the middle of the screen as a vertical rectangle. It was modeled after an eight-and-a-half by eleven sheet of paper. As DeVincenzi explains, the slender form wraps lines more quickly, which makes it a comfortable space to write both longer emails and quicker replies. It opens with a shadow underlay which subtly helps you focus on what you’re writing. The desktop app now lets you save drafts, which is a first for Mailbox. It’s still limited to Gmail and iCloud mail accounts.
To understand Mailbox’s greater approach to email, it’s instructive to compare its new desktop app to Gmail. Where Google might show you 20 or so messages on the default screen, Mailbox will just show you 9 or 10. That information density is very deliberate; it visually and conceptually puts individual messages forward as things you should act on in the moment, instead of a list of items you skim, open up when needed, or put off ’til later. “We wanted those emails to feel grabable and moveable,” DeVincenzi says of the thick, amply-padded messages in the Mailbox inbox. If you’re the type of person who works best when your papers are organized and your desk is free of clutter, you’ll instantly be able to see the appeal.
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