Some say I went on a tirade yesterday morning when I published this story, “Am I The Only One On Earth Who Thinks Mailbox Sucks”. Despite putting up some pretty good arguments I received some hate mail and hate tweets, after all I was downing the latest app phenomena that all the hipsters absolutely love… Hipsters that don’t receive any real volume of email.
In that piece I couldn’t figure out how some of my more established journalistic brethren who must get more email than me, could actually stand the Mailbox app. I receive anywhere from 300-500 emails per day. I usually receive 500 emails each day Monday-Wednesday and then it tapers off to the much more manageable 300 per day.
My biggest problem with the Mailbox app was batch deleting and folders. Carlson, a writer for Business Insider, found the exact same thing to be problematic.
“There’s one reason why it didn’t work for me: Mailbox makes you deal with one email at a time. You have to open or swipe (to the left, further to the left, to the right, or further to the right) each individual email. I get several hundred emails a day. ” Carlson wrote.
When I go through my email – which I do about 3 times per day – I go into the iPhone’s default mail app, tap “Edit” on the top right, and then quickly tap every email I don’t need to ever read (most of them) and then tap the bright red “archive” button.
It feels like one decision, an answer to a single question: “Are there any emails I need to see?”
Then I go back over the emails that remain and respond to the ones that need immediate attention. I flag the rest – emails I need to respond to, but not right away. I always get to them eventually.
When I’m doing email from my desktop, it’s the same process, but even better, because in Gmail I can shift-click to select multiple emails to archive or delete at once.
So I’m still not sure how much email you need to receive to get enjoyment out of the Mailbox app but if you figure it out please let me know in comments or on Twitter.
Read all of Carlson’s Business Insider Post here.
See my post from yesterday here