There’s been a lot of waiting around here lately. And not just in the Skadeedle office, people are waiting everywhere.  The reason? Mailbox – a new app designed to help you get a grip on your email inbox, and people are chomping at the bit to get their hands on it. It’s new (born out of Orchestra To-do, the Apple App Store’s 2011 Productivity App of the Year) and there’s a long wait list to get it. We know from experience, there are 746,652 people ahead of us (really).

So what is Mailbox all about and should you get in line for it? Mailbox is an app for iPhone to help you manage your Gmail inbox. For now, these are the only options, but it’s still new and they plan to add more features and platforms at a later date. Mailbox allows you to quickly and easily go through emails in your inbox and read them, archive them, or save them for later, with the ultimate goal being a totally empty inbox. Sound intriguing? Interesting? Impossible? From what we’ve seen it looks like a great tool to manage the inbox chaos we all seem to struggle with. The interface is super simple – you have a view into your inbox, and if you wish to read an email you just click on it. Pretty straight forward. But now for the cool part. Once you’ve read the email, or acted on it, you can archive it by swiping it to the right. You’ll see a green check-mark to let you know it’s been taken care of and remove it from your inbox view. Swipe a bit further to the right and it turns red to show the message has been deleted.

The best part is the snooze feature. If you swipe a message to the left you can ‘snooze’ it until a later time. And you have the option when that will be; later today, tomorrow, next week, or you can select a specific date if you’d rather. The message will come back to the inbox at the time you’ve set it to. So for all those messages you leave in the inbox as unread to deal with later, you can now deal with when it’s right for you. We’re excited about this feature since it will allow you to use your inbox as a to-do list, checking off things that need to be done once you’ve completed them, or saving them for later. Eventually leading to an empty inbox. And, it will be interesting to see what impact this will have on the emails that businesses send. In a pre-Mailbox app world, most people interact with your messages the same day or within a few days of sending it. With the Mailbox snooze option, they could possibly read it a week later or whenever they choose. How could this impact engagement, time-sensitive offers and more? It remains to be seen, but we’ll be sure to keep you posted.

To be added to the wait list you’ll need to download the app from the Apple app store and get your number in the queue. Lastly, check out this video showing the Mailbox app features in action.

How do you handle all the emails that hit your inbox daily? Do you plan to get the Mailbox app?

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