Just 3 Weeks after launch, Mailbox is already delivering 50 million messages a day
By Ryan Lawler, TechCrunch
Since launch just a few weeks ago, email management app Mailbox has been a pretty big hit — so big that more than 1.25 million people have signed up for the waiting list. The downside to that early success is that new users are added to a waiting list as Mailbox tries to keep up with demand. The company has processed about 500,000 applications so far, but it expects the number of people on the waiting list to increase according to its current growth curve.
To handle email snoozing and push notifications, Mailbox checks your email from the cloud and reformats it before sending it to users. As a result, the service needs to ensure that it has enough capacity to scale up with demand as new users are added. But the number of users and number of messages that are processed has been huge.
“We’re delivering about 50 million messages a day right now,” Underwood told me. That’s after just three weeks into its public launch. Just to put that into perspective, he said it took Twitter three years before it had the infrastructure to process the same amount of messages. Of course, that’s because Mailbox is trying to manage a whole lot of existing content in people’s email inboxes.
For more on this story go to:
More from Tech Fortune about the Mailbox app
A new email app? Sounds like a snooze. But Mailbox, software for managing email on the go, is generating massive hype, with iPhone users signing up at a stunningly quick rate
Mailbox offers a new twist on mobile email. Power users accustomed to Gmail’s message folders and color coding won’t find that. Instead, they’ll find simple gestures that treat messages like items on a to-do list. A finger swipe to the left on a message brings up a menu that allows one to basically hit the “snooze” button and choose when that message should pop up again as a reminder: Later Today, This Evening, or This Weekend. A short swipe to the right checks an email off and places it in the archive; a longer swipe to the right deletes it.
Email chains are streamlined to take up less space so users can more quickly scroll through them. Individual emails are downloaded and uploaded quicker than via popular competitors like Apple (AAPL) Mail or Sparrow thanks to some math on the back-end that compresses messages to take up less space.
The early success must feel good for Underwood, whose previous venture, a desktop and mobile task organizer called Orchestra, won Apple’s Productivity App of the Year in 2011 but quickly lost users. Underwood believes they became disillusioned with or intimidated by the idea of a comprehensive to-do app over the long run. What people were doing, he says, was treating email more and more like task reminders, sending themselves lists or treating individual messages as tasks. So the Orchestra crew did an about-face and baked some of what they had learned from Orchestra into the all-new Mailbox app. After using it for several days, I must say it is easy to use. It amplifies a sense of accomplishment once one’s email count reaches zero.
For much more go to:
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/tag/gentry-underwood/
