Dropbox announced today that it will be shutting down the Mailbox email app:
Building new products is about learning as much as it’s about making. It’s also about tough choices. Over the past few months, we’ve increased our team’s focus on collaboration and simplifying the way people work together. In light of that, we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Carousel and Mailbox.
Carousel always seemed kinda stupid to me, but Mailbox was definitely my email client of choice for a long while. They put out a really fantastic trailer long before the app was available that I must have watched a dozen times. And I can distinctly remember the slow roll out launch that they had where not everybody was able to get into the app at the same time; for about a week it seemed like everyone in the office where I worked was waiting to get in, and we would all compare our place in line and try to estimate when we'd have access.
And for a while, Mailbox was my go to app for design inspiration. Their "swipe to archive, swipe farther to delete" interaction was excellent, and I loved that the app rewarded its users for achieving Inbox Zero by showing them a different beautiful Instagram photo every day.
Today Tweetbot is my main design inspiration app, and the iPhone's (and Mac's!) Mail.app has a swipe to archive feature that is good enough I suppose. The world has moved on, but I'll always fondly remember the time that I had with Mailbox.