The Real Problem with Mailbox | Hacker News Reader

The Real Problem with Mailbox

blog.capwatkins.com

28 pointscapwatkins31 comments

Another alternative to things like Mailbox is not using your email inbox as a project manager at all.

After 15 years of abusing my own inbox this way (5172 "unread" todos to go! yay!), I grabbed a copy of Things.app a few weeks ago, and then swept the last month of my inbox into Things (skipping everything that wasn't actionable). I use virtually none of the features of Things; it's just a hotkey bound to "create a todo for this email" with the nice property of linking the todo back to the original email. I've played with tagging and projects, but they're not nearly as useful as just having a list of todos with checkboxes.

I don't do "GTD" or any of that stuff, and I am not a believer in the value of "inbox zero", but I'm now a convert to the idea that your inbox is a crappy organizer.

Mind sharing how you hooked the two apps together? Applescript?

Yep, Applescript. Quick Google search turns up this: http://smoove-operator.blogspot.com/2011/05/gtd-intake-autom...

Worth mentioning that OmniFocus has a built-in tool for this (humorously called the "Clip-o-Tron 3000")

I use the auto-fill plugin that Cultured ships with the app. I didn't have to use any Applescript.

I think a huge part of the appeal of Mailbox is it's less than a full-featured project management/GTD tool -- it basically prescribes a certain approach to managing your inbox (do, defer, archive.)

I was a GTD-ish person before Mailbox came along, so I had a system for handling these things, but I know a ton of people who either never made the effort or repeatedly tried and failed to get onto some GTD/task management system; often, I think, due to tyranny-of-choice type issues.

Post-Mailbox, I still manage my commitments in Things, but I manage my "accept queue" (if you will) via Mailbox-- "triage" is really an excellent way to put it. Sometimes the resolution is "I'm too tired to think about this, tell me about it again tomorrow"-- and that works a lot more seamlessly than Boomerang, hitmelater, etc, IMO.

(disclaimer: I have no financial interest in mailbox/orchestra, but I know-- and like-- the team and have given them small amounts of technical advice.)

My problem with Mailbox (and the reason I never activated it despite getting to the front of their queue) is that it requires me to trust someone else with access to my email. The inbox is the keys to so many other systems these days once you factor in password-resets. I'm just not willing to hand over that kind of access to an additional third-party beyond what I've already chosen to accept as an acceptable level of risk by trusting Google for my webmail. What Mailbox, and that decision not to use their service, has caused me to do was make a concerted effort to reduce the amount of automated and spam mail I was dealing with. Over the past couple weeks I've been able to make a noticeable change to what hits my inbox each day.

When Sparrow came out people complained that it couldn't send new mail notifications. Now Mailbox does the only thing you can do to get that kind of control and people complain that their servers could go down. People want bear patrol, but they don't want to pay taxes for it.

This is the reason. With iOS, this is the only way to get pushed new mail notifications. The rest could be done without a server, but that was sparrows #1 complaint (and for me and many others a requirement) +1 for bear patrol!

But the only reason you have to pay taxes is because Apple makes you. It amazes me the lengths people go to in order to work around Apple's limitations. Multiple servers, waiting lists... it just seems insane.

Please don't call this travesty of a proprietary mobile app "Mailbox". They don't own the word.

I'm curious what you'd prefer the author to refer to it as instead? Even the article name uses it as a proper noun; I'd understand if it was "mailbox" instead of "Mailbox", but it seems pretty clear to me. Mailbox.app?

Not really my problem, but Mailbox on the Apple App Store (yes this is a fractal of trademark abuse) or Orchestra Mailbox (like Google Tasks) works.

I call it MailBox.app

Seems to disambiguate nicely.

How about Mailbox.ipa ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ipa_(file_extension)

Does Apple own the word 'Mail'?

No, but people call it Mail.app.

Does Mailbox stores your e-mail in their servers? Even if it's temporary, I don't think is a good idea. Why exactly do they need to do this? Building the same awesomeness on top of an IMAP client wouldn't have achieved the same goal?

"Mailbox helps you manage your email, and in order to provide you with that service, we need to collect, store, and in rare cases, share your personal information."

Yay - sharing!

"Mailbox is designed to help you manage your email account with other providers, like Gmail. When you link your email accounts (provided by third parties) to Mailbox, you give Mailbox permission to securely access your information contained in or associated with those accounts. If you link your third party account to Mailbox, that third party may also pass certain information along about your use of its service. While Mailbox does not store your password to these email accounts, the service does securely store some emails on a temporary basis in order to deliver them to you as quickly as possible and keep track of your deferred messages."

http://www.mailboxapp.com/privacy/

I think the author is missing part of the reason it runs through the servers. Along with storing the "read it later" actions, running it through their servers allows background checking and push notifications, which isn't possible for 3rd party email services on iOS otherwise (though I agree that a graceful fallback to checking gmail directly would be nice)

> And look, I'm not an engineer, but this seems like a really bad plan. When I launch Sparrow, the only way my email doesn't come through is if Gmail itself goes down. With Mailbox, I'm adding a second point of failure.

The first and most likely point of failure is network issues (i.e. no Wifi or 3G access).

[EDIT: This might be a bit off-topic to the issue raised by the author] I find the whole idea of zero inbox incredibly useless to my workflow as I don't care to treat email as GTD. The only value I get out of keeping Mailbox on my phone is the snooze feature (which unfortunately no Google App Script or Chrome Extension has been able to address properly yet). Once that gets solved by Gmail, Mailbox will be a goner. And yes, even though the author pooh-pooh'ed them at the introduction of the article, lack of labels and a couple of other features (like Undo) make Mailbox a no-go for me on a regular basis. Countering these objections with "missing the point" is extremely lazy IMHO.

Have you tried Boomerang? Pre-Mailbox, their "snooze" feature was the only thing I used for email. I love it.

http://www.boomeranggmail.com

I just mark things unread and handle them later.

That's how I have been doing it until not too long ago.

Actually only heard of it when Mailbox was coming out - looks like they have GTD nailed because they target businesses. I'll definitely give it a try (although with the free plan and it's 10 message credit limit - hopefully I don't need to snooze too many messages in a month). The sad thing is that the clean new-age UI, the queue-reservation-based hype and the publicity from its investors like MG made this sound like groundbreaking thing which it isn't.

I have a perfectly working Google App Scrit that does snooze - 1-5 days, 1-3 weeks, and 1-6 months. I wrote it myself, and never found time to publish.

There are other scripts out there, in which ways did you find them deficient?

No second point of failure => no native push notifications.

Not true - they could check email and send you push notifications server-side, but still have the client talk directly to gmail for nearly all functions.

> they could check email

That requires non-google action. That is a point of failure.

Sure, but the failure means that you don't get push notifications - you can still use your email app.

That is correct, and has nothing to do with my original statement:

No second point of failure => no native push notifications.

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