July 9-10, 2013
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Mailbox is bringing its war on email inefficiency to another front: the iPad.

The email client, which launched in February on the iPhone, has been one of the most popular ways for iPhone owners to manage and reply to emails. It’s simple, clean, and according to people who use it, gets email out of the way quickly.

Mailbox for iPad, is more of the same and is, at its heart, just a blown-up version of Mailbox for iPhone — so don’t expect any big, earth-shaking changes here. The one notable shift with the app is that the message panel is now on the left side of the screen rather than the right so that it’s consistent with the iPad’s default Mail app. (The app doesn’t work in portrait mode, by the way.)

It’s also notable that Mailbox for iPad comes with no hints of the app’s change in ownership. Dropbox acquired Mailbox a month after its launch, though it doesn’t look like the company is eager to put its stamp on it just yet.

Also, Android owners — don’t feel left out. Mailbox says that it’s also working on a version of the app for Google’s mobile operating system, though there’s no indication of when that app will arrive.

July 9-10, 2013
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File-sharing company Dropbox has acquired Mailbox, the email management app everyone’s been drooling over for the past few weeks all over the Internet.

In a note on the Dropbox company blog, co-founders Arash Ferdowsi and Drew Houston wrote that they were as obnoxiously besotted with the idea of the app as the rest of y’all.

“When we discovered Mailbox, we fell in love — it was simple, delightful, and beautifully engineered,” they wrote.

“After spending time with [Mailbox parent company Orchestra founders] Gentry [Underwood], Scott [Cannon], and the team, it became clear that their calling was the same as ours at Dropbox — to solve life’s hidden problems and re-imagine the things we do every day. We all quickly realized that together we could save millions of people a lot of pain.”

The Dropbox folks didn’t say how much the barely-even-launched-yet app was worth in dollars and cents for the purposes of this deal, but they did hint they’ll be using their audience to get Mailbox even more distribution than its already ridiculously long line of panting nerds waiting for an invite.

If you’d like to get an idea of what the aforementioned nerds are panting about, here’s a demo clip. Roll ‘em!

Orchestra took a $5 million round of funding late last year from Charles River Ventures, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, and Kapoor Capital, among others. The Mailbox product was first announced mid-December 2013, but a long queue has prevented many eager beavers from actually getting their hands on the app, which is only available now for Gmail and iPhone.

Orchestra was founded in 2011 and is based in Palo Alto, Calif.

July 9-10, 2013
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You know what sucks worse than email? Waiting in line to use an app that’s supposed to make using email easier. That’s exactly what you’ll have to do if you download the hotly discussed mobile email iPhone app Mailbox.

Fortunately, rival Taskbox can do pretty much everything Mailbox does, but without the ridiculously long waiting period.

Like Mailbox, Taskbox is an iOS email client app that operates under the assumption that it’s much easier to plow through your messages using figure gestures on your smartphone. For example, flicking your fingers right lets you archive or delete worthless messages, while swiping the opposite direction gives you the option to mark a message important.

“Clearing through your messages is really only half the battle people face when dealing with email overload. The real challenge is what to do once you’re finished,” Taskbox CEO and founder Andrew Eye told VentureBeat in an interview recently. “All your assignments and tasks usually originate from the inbox, so we really felt it was necessary to do something that addressed those problems, and not just improve your mobile email experience.”

I first encountered Taskbox back in October 2012 shortly after its initial launch and was pretty much sold on the experience. However, the startup is planning to launch a new version with a cleaner, more simplified UI, which I’ve had a chance to check out.

When you mark a message as important in Taskbox, you actually move it into a separate “Taskbox” folder and have the option of rating it by importance on a scale of 1 to 5. You can also mark messages as “complete” or “delegate” (both of which also have their own sub-folders), send short canned responses, and schedule deadlines.

Right now, the app only supports Gmail and Google Apps accounts, but more email services are planned for the future, as are native apps for Android, Windows Phone 8, and BlackBerry 10. The app runs into some issues with threaded conversations that all appear as separate messages, but if you’re constantly sorting your email through Taskbox, they shouldn’t cause you much of a problem.

The iPhone app will also set you back $3, whereas Mailbox is free; still, there are some advantages to paying for the app. Eye points to Mailbox’s bout of downtime last week as one reason to opt for a paid service.

“Downtime in email is unacceptable,” he said. Unlike Mailbox, he explained, Taskbox isn’t running all your data through its own servers, which means there’s no downtime and fewer security risks.

“Taskbox is a pure email client with no server technology necessary. That means no storing or mining of your personal information on proprietary servers… [and] no additional company/technology between you and your mission critical email,” Eye said.

Founded in 2012, the Austin, Tex.-based startup has six employees and is seeking a Series A round of funding.

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Updated at 3:25 p.m. PT after service was restored.

Hot iPhone app Mailbox suffered a major outage today, but the app is now back online for most users.

Orchestra CEO Gentry Underwood said the exact issue that crashed the application hasn’t quite been determined, but it is figuring it out and will stop new users from getting in for now.

“We hit some limits that we need to spend more time understanding, so we’re going go keep the reservation system paused until we know more,” Underwood told VentureBeat.

Prior to the outage we spoke to Underwood, who said his 15-person team was doing everything they could to address the problem.

“We’re busting our asses to get it back up,” Orchestra CEO Gentry Underwood told us while the outage was occurring earlier today. “The system is down for everyone right now. All of our team is working on it.”

Mailbox attracted a lot of attention when it debuted last week to astounding demand. The attention mostly came from the promise that Mailbox could help an average Gmail user manage their email better than any other iPhone app. It offers stripped-down email messages to make them easier to read, a “snooze button” to push back a message’s placement, and smart push notifications.

When we first wrote about it last week, more than 380,000 people were waiting to use Mailbox. Now the queue sits at about 800,000 people. “Throttling new users as they are added to the system has been incredibly powerful at keeping it from falling over,” Underwood said.

When the app launched, some folks who were placed in the long queue accused the makers of doing the slow rollout to generate buzz. But Underwood said the purpose of the line was to create a controlled flow of users and make a crash less likely. Turns out even with the line, the system was still vulnerable.

“Even with rate limiting in place, we can’t foresee every problem,” Underwood said. “The team has been working 24-hour shifts since launch.”

Mailbox’s Twitter account responded furiously to user complaints and questions, trying to keep disgruntled users at ease.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Email sucks. We know that, and it’s not changing anytime soon. But one way to make our email lives better is with mail clients that are designed to make the process smoother and more efficient.

The new app Mailbox could be one of those clients. Mailbox officially launched today to rave reviews from several tech blogs. The Verge’s Ellis Hamburger describes it this way: “A revelation in simple, decisive, and logical design, but it eschews some conventional Gmail power features in favor of expedience.”

So the app is cool and has handy features like stripping down email messages to make them easier to read, a snooze button to push back messages, and push notifications.

But to actually get access to Mailbox’s app, you must first sit in an incredibly long wait list. As of Thursday afternoon, the app has about 380,000 people waiting to get access. The company insists it will quickly fill reservations, but it doesn’t want anything to break.

That said, the long wait makes it look suspiciously like a marketing ploy, like a hot nightclub that keeps a line outside to attract attention and build buzz.

Since the app uses the cloud and runs on servers from Amazon Web Services, it seems like the app should be able to scale up quickly to handle all the people that are waiting. Or so one might think.

Mailbox CEO Gentry Underwood (pictured right) told VentureBeat that his small team had no other choice.

Originally, Mailbox planned to charge $3 for the app, but that changed after its debut video attracted more than 1 million views. “We originated too much interest too fast,” Underwood said.

So instead of charging on day one and potentially crashing its servers (which would greatly damage the brand), the team decided to make the app free but give people access at a slower rate.

“We just walked away from a lot of cash to do this, so we want to do it right,” Underwood said.

Since that time, they’ve put effort into creating a system they know will work and work well for every one.

“We’ve designed the system to be as redundant and fault-tolerant as possible and have done as much load testing ahead of time as we could conceive of doing without real users,” Underwood said. “The reason we didn’t just ‘switch it on,’ though, is because we don’t know what we don’t know. Even the most advanced services run into problems when they initially scale, and we wanted to maximize the chance that we could keep our service up.”

In fact, Underwood said that his team ran into a problem with “sockets” this morning that no doubt would have crashed the app today if everyone on the wait list had access to it. “It would have fallen over,” Underwood said.

He said he understands people are accusing Mailbox of running a marketing ploy by having the long wait list, but he insists it’s there to keep the app running reliably. He rejects it with an analogy that goes back to nightclubs:

“It’s like a party or a nightclub that a lot of people want to get into,” Underwood said. “You don’t want to wait in line but if people are walking out and saying ‘that sucked’, it’s over.”

Check out a video below for Mailbox for more on how it works:

Photos via Mailbox and LinkedIn