Inbox vs Mailbox -- Fight!

Mail is one of the bugbears in my electronic life. While I keep my work inbox tamed, my personal email is another matter entirely. So when I heard about Google's new Inbox, I thought that it might be very interesting to give a test spin. I learned from a friend that just before Inbox had come out, Dropbox had released a competing product called Mailbox. Truly, my cup runneth over. So I decided to try both of them out.

Both of these apps do essentially the same thing: they try to provide you with an interface into your mailbox from which you can triage your mail. You can sort it into lists; set up persistent rules that will sort future incoming mail; let you put certain emails to sleep, so that they can pop up at a later time; and archive mail that's not relevant right now, but which you might want to search for in the future. The ultimate goal of this exercise is to get you down to a zero item inbox so that only emails that are current and relevant to you now are in it. This is a laudable goal; and I've many friends who swear by this technique. So how do they do?

Well, both applications accomplish this task about as well as the other. This is in large part because the two are almost identical, both in features and in interface. Google's Inbox 'bundles' some of your mail together (in categories like 'Sales' or 'Friends' or the like) while Dropbox's Mailbox starts you off with a clean slate from which to define your own categories.

Mailbox works by letting you swipe mails left or right to send them to lists/to-dos and to archives/trash. You long press to set a future rule for your mail. When swiping, you can do a short swipe to perform a least-drastic action on that piece of mail, like putting it into the archives; you can also do a long swipe to take an action you might want to consider carefully, like tossing mail into the trash. You can view your mail in one of three ways: you can see all the mail that you've set to pop back up again on one pane; you can see your current inbox on the second pane of the application; and you can see your archived (or 'done') mail on the third pane. There's also a slide out panel that lets you drop into any lists that you've made in the course of triaging your mail.

Inbox does essentially the same thing, but only really concerns itself with two swipes: left to send set a piece of mail to pop back into your mailbox at a future time; and right to set a piece of mail to a 'done' state. You can also 'pin' pieces of your mail into a to-do list by clicking on the icon subtly shaped like a pin.

So interface-wise, Mailbox has a (very) slightly steeper learning curve than Inbox; you have to internalize what short swipes, long swipes and long presses all do. On the flip side, once you've mastered these gestures, Mailbox suddenly has a much more consistent workflow than Inbox. While Inbox requires you to occasionally go outside of the swiping paradigm (to pin mail, to move it to other folders or lists, etc), Mailbox can be effectively used by just swiping with the occasional click on a requester that pops up. Both apps' designs reflect their origins: Inbox is -very- user-friendly, to the point of being slightly hostile to power users; while Mailbox gives you tools and lets you work with them how you wish.

One feature that Inbox has that Mailbox doesn't is a contextual undo: when you've moved mail around, the undo option magically appears at the bottom of the screen. If you need to undo in Mailbox, you need to swipe to bring up a pane which allows you to revoke your previous decision. It's not a big thing; but it would make life with Mailbox a little bit easier.

Another feature that Inbox has is the ability to send mail to any of the email aliases that you've defined in GMail. I don't send mail from my gmail account, so being able to send from my personal account in Inbox is extremely nice. Mailbox (which likely has less complete hooks into the Google API than Google does) only allows you to send mail from your GMail account.

Gun to my head, which one would I use? I'd probably pick Mailbox due to it feeling like a more cohesive user experience. But Mailbox only wins by a very slender margin; feature-wise, the two apps are almost suspiciously identical; and a case can be made that practically, Inbox has higher value for me since I can actually send mail from it using my preferred email address.

Unfortunately, neither one is immediately likely to become part of my daily mail trawl. Inbox requires you to use Google Chrome on your desktop, which is problematic for me because I don't like using it. ;-> My situation with Mailbox is a little worse: it requires you to use their desktop app, which is currently only available for Macintosh OSX. Dropbox has a good history of supporting Linux with native clients, unlike some storage companies (I'm looking at you Box. Even MEGASync could provide me with a native client. But you I have to mount via WebDav? Seriously?) so I expect there to be a Linux Mailbox client... eventually. After Windows gets a client. Possibly a long time after Windows gets a client. But while I'm hopeful, I'm not holding my breath.

So if Inbox comes to Firefox or if Mailbox comes to Linux (or even to a web client), I may start using the service or services more often. While both applications have extremely robust Android clients (which is where I've spent the bulk of my time with them), my handheld devices are rarely what I turn to when I'm triaging mail. I spend most of my mail time on the desktop.

However, both applications are worth checking out. Mailbox is free for anyone to try out; Inbox requires an invite code, though Google has started giving those out like water in a marathon. Try them both and see which one catches your fancy more. You may just find what you're looking for to tame your email.