by Cyrus Farivar - Mar 15 2013 - arstechnica
Highly anticipated Mailbox app still has slow-moving reservations setup.
In case you haven't heard, Mailbox is the iOS app that everyone wants to get their grubby little paws on. The hip new e-mail app is an alternative interface for Gmail accounts (
yes, it only works with Gmail). People who have used it love the gesture-based interface and the ability to “snooze” messages—this latter feature prompts a pop-up message to remind you to reply at some point in the future, like later in the day, later that night, or over the weekend.
On Friday morning, Mailbox announced that it was acquired by Dropbox. With any luck, that means Mailbox’s frustrating rollout policy might be relaxed. The app, which debuted in early February 2013, is so popular that the company has slowed its release through a “reservations” system. Presumably to stem the crushing demand, Mailbox restricts the number of new accounts that can be activated at a time.
Ars’ Jacqui Cheng had to wait roughly five weeks before she moved to the front of the line, and she only recently had her “reservation” activated. (I still have about 260,000 people ahead of me.)The tiny company’s valuation and the size of the Dropbox deal are still unknown—but the Wall Street Journal notes that Mailbox received $5.3 million in 2011 in venture capital.
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Since launching last month, our service capacity has grown 2000x and we’re already delivering more than 60 million emails a day,” the company wrote on its blog. “That’s mind-bending growth for only a few weeks, and we’re just getting started."
“Rather than grow Mailbox on our own, we’ve decided to join forces with Dropbox and build it out together," the company continued. "To be clear, Mailbox is not going away. The product needs to grow fast, and we believe that joining Dropbox is the best way to make that happen.”
http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/03/dropbox-acquires-mailbox-to-help-grow-the-gmail-app-for-ios-quickly/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+All+content%29
