Move Over Mailbox, Taskbox Is Better For Us Working Folks [video][SXSW]

Taskbox,Mailbox,Austin startup,SXSW,sxswi,startup pitch videoI’ve been pretty hard on the “Mailbox” app, and for good reason. In my opinion they had the best marketing I’ve ever seen (in 1 year with nibletz and 4 as thedroidguy) for any app release, ever. At the end though, the cute, hipster email sensation left me with email blue balls.

The Mailbox app  prompted me to write this post “Am I the only one one earth who thinks Mailbox suck” two days before any other journalist stepped up and called them out. Finally, Nicholas Carlson at SAI posted his thoughts, that were inline with mine.

Low and behold, a messiah rose out of the email heavens on Friday afternoon at SXSW when Andrew Eye, the CEO at Taskbox pitched a new form of email, blending your email with your tasks in a way that’s natural for business. My only regret so far is not spending time with him on Thursday night on the ATX startup crawl, so I could have started to use Taskbox even earlier.

So in his pitch Eye reveals some interesting information that makes sense. With the rise in smartphones and the mobile first experience, people are checking their email 40% more by mobile than on a computer. My hand is raised on that one for sure.  On the computer there are plenty of ways to delegate your email flow, on mobile not so much. On the Mailbox app, delegation just sucks.

Eye is no stranger to technology, he’s been a software architect for NASA and the U.S. Marines. Taskbox is also a Capital Factory startup, which just happens to be run by email startup king Joshua Baer.

So after using Taskbox for the last 18 hours or so and driving the crap out of it, here’s what I like.

  • deleting: even though its swipe deleting it doesn’t require that long press that Mailbox does, just swipe to the left real fast and it’s gone. It leaves a second ask up on the screen but if you’re deleting quickly once you swipe the next message the first is gone
  • calendar priority assignment. If you want to delegate an email for later in the day or week you can do it easily. You’re not just throwing it in a “later” bucket, you can assign a date. For example, I’ve gotten a bunch of emails during SXSW that I want to return when I get home, I just assign them for the day I’m home. They don’t sit in a later bucket with 100 other emails they go to the date I want. (it makes you look more punctual)
  • Folders, all of my gmail labels are in Taskbox, where Mailbox only had three labels and labels I didn’t use.

So if you fell for the Mailbox app like I did, I highly suggest you check out the right box, task box. Check out Eye’s pitch below from the SXSW panel “Startups Immune To The Series A Crunch”, and for more visit taskbox.co

Vindicated: Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson Deleted Mailbox Too

Mailbox app,Mailbox,startup,app review, business insider, nicholas carlsonSome 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. 

He goes into the same detail that I do about batch deleting:

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