Mailbox is a terrible idea

After waiting in line behind 119,000 people, my Mailbox account was activated. Waiting for those 119,000 people gave me some time to really think about the app, however. It gave me the time to realize that the app is not a good idea for anyone. Let me explain.

The main feature of Mailbox is the ability to get to Fake Inbox Zero by "snoozing" your emails. This is also it's very worst feature.

Suppose you are Mr. Super Important Email Man, and you get a cool 500 emails per day. Fake Inbox Zero sounds great, doesn't it?

Math Time

I'm going to be generous here, and assume that you can reasonably handle 70% of your email¹ to start off. At the end of Day One, you will have 150 emails left in your inbox. Snooze time! You (not so) wisely snooze those 150 emails until tomorrow, so you can enjoy Fake Inbox Zero for a moment.

Day Two

Since you're Super Important, another 500 emails are delivered to you. The 150 snoozed emails from Day One are also back, bringing your total to an unhealthy 650 emails. We already determined that processing 350 emails is about where you top out. That means you'll process 350 emails on Day Two, but you'll have to snooze 300 emails.

Day Three

500 emails. 300 from yesterday's snooze-binge. That's 800 total, 350 processed, and a whopping 450 snoozed.

Fast forward to Day 21

Your inbox explodes from the weight of the 3,500 emails delivered to it. You look at it, think about the fruitlessness of processing a measly 10% of your email, and go play golf.

Your golf game will improve if you use Mailbox in this way. Your ability to handle your email will suffer drastically, and that's exactly the opposite of what you're trying to do here. The last thing you need is more email.

What if I don't get very much email at all?

Why in the world would you need Mailbox if you get six emails a day? Handle it and quit crying about it.

Server issues

Mailbox is already a very bad idea before you even consider the server issues. Mailbox only works with Gmail. Gmail is historically very reliable, but it does go down. With Mailbox, you're reliant not only on Gmail's servers, but Mailbox's server as well. If Mailbox goes down, so does your use of the Mailbox app. All your cool snoozing and procrastinating goes out the window. You can still use Mail.app or the web view, of course... but using Mailbox introducing another way for your email to break.

So. Bad idea. Procrastination. More ways for your mail to break. Mailbox is free, but it's a terrible idea. Pass.