Gadgetory

hey this is Ellis with the verge checking out mailbox the highly anticipated new Gmail app for iPhone launching for free on the App Store today when you first open mailbox you'll immediately see your inbox you have message previews subjects in bold the first thing you're gonna want to look at is an actual conversation and all conversations all messages you've previously read are going to be grayed out and minimized into just little snippets which makes it super easy to go through all your messages if you want to blow on up and see the whole thing you can tap on it if you want to see the complete email which includes all this garbage that mailbox strips out you can tap it one more time what you can do from here is you can star an email right here you can add this email to one of your labels you can set this for later go back to your inbox archive it or delete it so let's respond to this email really quick and you can kind of see the interface it's really small minimalist and nice it's kind of like a text message you can change who you want to send me send the message to it's really easy to add a photo just like an you kind of do on Twitter for iPhone you just pop something right in there and it works really nicely so let's back back up to the inbox and have a look at how you address messages so you have a few options for addressing a message the first thing you can do is archive something by dragging it this way if you keep dragging you can delete it if you swipe this way you can set something for later and if you keep going further you can mark it as a label so it's a really easy way to address something on the fly so let's go to the bread-and-butter this app which is marked something for later so you can mark this as later today this evening tomorrow this weekend next week in a month someday and you can even pick a date and the cool thing is with these snoozes mailbox handle these on their servers so if you're using a desktop email client or desktop Gmail those messages will pop back into that account at the same time if you look at the top of the screen you have the things you've marked to do later so let's say we mark this for this weekend and you hop up there you can actually see chronologically when these things are going to pop back in your inbox let's have this one be for a month and this one for some day you hop back in there and boom it's chronologically organized which is really nice and if you go to archived up here you can bounce something right back in your inbox if you want to just by doing that so let's open the drawer and see what's going on over there this is your mailbox error you can choose your separate inboxes for different accounts if you want to look at them independently you can also see once again your later menu your labels archive and trash and scent which are consolidated among all your accounts which some people won't like but I personally don't mind and then you also have the Settings menu where you can happen add email account so you can add up to 5 Gmail accounts right now you can pick a default account you can add a signature you can alter your labels which are called lists here and snoozes is the real cool thing here so if you tap snoozes here you can actually modify when emails are popped back into your inbox so let's say you mark something to pop back this weekend you can say well when do I want my weekend to start or when do I want my workday to start you could even have later today or some day which you can modify if you go even further down you'll be happy to note that there are push notifications unlike Sparrow for both new messages and force news messages if you want to treat mailbox like a to-do list it also helps if you want to use the to-do list kind of paradigm for using this app you can also have a badge represent how many new things you have in your inbox there's a lot to love about mailbox but Gmail power users will miss a few things like the ability to mark a few emails at the same time the ability to mute something which is a great Gmail feature and we also miss the ability to look at one main starred menu of items and also there's no mark as spam or consolidated spam area inside mailbox but we'd expect that to come sometime soon well I can download mailbox today the company has a wait list you can see inside the app that shows what place you hold in line it's annoying but guarantees the launch goes smoothly for company servers after testing mailbox for the last two months I can honestly say it's helped increase my productivity even without Mac iPad and Android app which the company says are in the works mailbox for iPhone really turns email into a more conversational and more useful experience you