Dropbox acquired the makers of the popular Mailbox application for iOS along with the app last year.
Today, the company launched Mailbox for Android which is currently available for free on Google Play. You can head over to Google Play right away to install the application.
The application is limited to iCloud and Google accounts currently, which means that it is not really a practicable solution if you use other accounts as well or exclusively.
The application itself requires Android 4.03 and requests lots of permissions. Make sure you check those out before you install it on your device.
The first thing you are asked to do after installation is link it to a Dropbox account. The account is detected automatically if Dropbox is installed on the system.
Once that is out of the way, you need to add at least one Google or iCloud account to get started. It is possible to add multiple accounts.
All inbox emails are displayed on a single page. The sender and time is displayed for each, as well as the title and the first couple of words of the body text.
What makes Mailbox interesting is the swipe functionality. You can swipe to the left to schedule the reading of the email at a later point in time. It is added to the later folder and can be accessed at any time when you open the later zone in the app. A long swipe to the left adds the email to a list. Mailbox ships with some, like to buy, to read and to do, and provides you with options to create your own lists.
When you swipe to the right, you either archive it, or send it to the trash depending on how far you swipe.
The app ships with a new feature called auto-swipe. It works much like swipe, only that Mailbox learns from your actions. Say you get a backup report each day per email. You can use auto-swipe to automatically archive that email for example.
It works more or less like filters, but without the fiddling around that filters require to create the right matches for emails that you want processed automatically.
The auto-swipe feature becomes available when you open an email in the Mailbox app. Long-tap on one of the options at the top, e.g, archive or schedule so that Mailbox performs the action on similar emails from that moment on.
This is extremely powerful. You can for instance snooze (schedule) all your friends emails throughout the day to come up again in the evening when you are off work.
Verdict
The email app is intuitive to use once you understand what the different symbols mean. The auto-swipe functionality makes life even easier and if you are using Gmail or iCloud exclusively, then you may want to give this a try as it is well thought out.
If you use other providers, then this app is not really for you, unless you do not mind using multiple apps to manage all of your accounts.
I guess it is theoretically possible to redirect all emails through Gmail to use Mailbox for other accounts as well, but that is probably not something that you may want to do. Therefor, only four out of five stars.
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