If You’re Serious About Email Ditch Mailbox For Boxer, Launching Today

Earlier this year the startup world was abuzz about the brand new Mailbox app. You remember, the one that made you download a countdown timer, and for most, wait several days before getting your hands on the app. However, people who get high volumes of email, quickly saw that Mailbox was a hype machine. The hype got so loud they quickly got acquired by the team at DropBox.

While all that was going on, tens of thousands of people descended upon Austin, Texas, for the annual Woodstock of startups, SXSW Interactive. It was there, at the Capital Factory and then on one of the startup stages, we found Taskbox.

We got to hear about the meat and potatoes baked into Taskbox during a pitch session focused on startups that were immune to the series A crunch. All the startups in that pitch session had an investment ask at the end of their decks, but we were just longing for a really good email app designed for people that actually get email.

Taskbox proved to be that app. In fact, the Taskbox team accelerated at Capital Factory which just happens to be founded by Joshua Baer, who made most of his fortune in–you guessed it–email.

After downloading, I discovered immediately that the team behind Taskbox had loaded the app with easy to use features, an appealing UX/UI, and had actually considered people who received a lot of email.

I receive anywhere from 350-500 fresh email messages a day that can’t be marked as spam. If I factor in “spam,” we’re closer to 1000.

So Andrew Eye tipped me off a few weeks ago. He told me that during SXSW he had met Xoogler Jason Shellen. Shellen has a very strong background having worked with Google, AOL, and his own startup Brizzly. During their time together at SXSW, Shellen told Eye that he was working on something new called Boxer. Boxer had even simpler, easy to understand features. The Taskbox team quickly acquired Boxer and brought Shellen on as head of product.

Shellen helped the Taskbox team revamp the UI by flattening it and adding some features that I’m really excited about, like the ability to “like” an email. This feature will let the writer know “Hey, I’m not ignoring you.” Sometimes that’s all you need to say in an email: message received and understood! It’s like a 10-4 button.

Other features include:

Powerful swipe gestures to help triage, respond, and manage on-the-go
Inline profile images & helpful contact cards
Works with all your existing email accounts (including Gmail, Exchange, Yahoo and more)
Dropbox integration for adding files to email from the cloud
Adds elements of social tools to email to make email more fun and like-able again

While the Taskbox team had a great product to start with, in reforming and launching under the Boxer name, they’re going t take email to yet another level. They also added more heavyweights to their founding dream team. Adam Cianfichi. formerly with Accuvant and Ciphent, and Ian Ragsdale who worked with Baer on OtherInbox and also Skylist, round out the new Boxer team. Andrew is the CEO, Adam heads up Design, Ian runs Engineering, and Jason runs Product.

The app is gesture based (yes like Mailbox), but what you can do with the gestures is infinitely more powerful. You can swipe to earmark an email for a set later date, you can archive it, like it, use a quick response or add it to the “to do” list. They’ve also integrated a favorites list and the ability to call up all email exchanges between you and another person with a click of a button. It’s almost like a mobile email based CRM.

Currently, Boxer is only available for iOS. Find out more here at getboxer.com

Now read: Am I the only one on earth who thinks Mailbox Sucks?

Email Is Ripe For A Disruption Is It Coming From HotMail & Microsoft?

Back in the mid 90’s you were too cool for school if you were using a free web based email service. Hotmail had surged to the top of the email providers that were called “web based” then, now of course it’s cloud based. Back in 1997 Microsoft acquired Hotmail for $400 million (that’s about a billion in 2013 dollars).

Around the same time there were other providers out there like Yahoo, Rocketmail and a host of quick up and comers but none had the market dominance of Hotmail.

In 2004 the tables were turned when Google introduced their GMail platform. The attraction was it’s clean look and virtually unlimited space. We’re all too familiar with the ticker that shows just how much data those Google servers are handling.

Now as everyone turns to mobile, it’s been a pretty safe assumption that the next email disruptor would be of the mobile variety. Mailbox app came out with a lot of thunder, despite the fact that I hated it. I like an app called TaskBox but it hasn’t had the big red carpet marketing push that Mailbox had. It was actually their great marketing stunt, making people wait in line, that attracted a ton of attention, a ton of early users and then a purchase by the folks at DropBox.

There have been a few other subtle email disruptions that have come up in the past few years like Sparrow but nothing has disrupted email the way that GMail did nearly a decade ago.

Until now?

This is how Hotmail looked in the 90’s (image: Business Insider)

Microsoft has just redone their cloud based email platforms. They’ve given a new look to all the various email brands available in the Microsoft cloud. Today, by going over to hotmail.com you can sign up for a brand new Hotmail email adress, a Microsoft live account or Microsoft’s new outlook.com service which was the big thing Microsoft was pushing at SXSW this year.

Gone is the clunky style 1990’s interface that plagued Hotmail and made them look decades behind when it came to competing with GMail. At first glance most users to the new Hotmail may get confused and think they are looking at GMail.

The new interface is extremely clean and the ads have been moved to non-obtrusive boxes on the right side of the page. Microsoft has also incorporated contacts, calendar and their cloud based Sky Drive as part of the new outlook.com/Hotmail experience.

It would take a lot for me to move off the totally integrated Google cloud that I’ve been chained too for the last few years. My contacts, calendar and mail have been managed by Google for at least the last 4 years. I’ve also been using Google Docs and now Google Drive since they were first introduced. It had actually been a solid 4 years that I hadn’t’ had a Microsoft product on any of my Mac computers (I recently purchased the latest version of Office for Mac).

One thing that could be a game changer for me is how long I can tolerate the newest “compose” screen for GMail. While you can still “temporarily” go back to the original compose style, the new style is extremely hard to manage when you’re trying to get through your GMail as fast as possible.

On iOS it seems that Microsoft accounts integrate just as easily as GMail accounts, however I haven’t used a native Microsoft mail app, nor have I even looked to see if one exists.

For now I’ve got the Hotmail account set up and we will see how it goes. All of my primary mail accounts are still GMail though.

What about you? Add your comment below.

Now Read:

So Am I The Only One On Earth Who Thinks Mailbox Sucks?

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

I’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