Sorry Mailbox… You just have to go!

I wouldn’t say I’m on the bleeding edge of technology adoption, but I’m definitely not one to be last to a party. I first installed Mailbox over 8 months ago, the same day it was first launched for Android. For some strange reason, I ended up uninstalling it the same week and switching back to my old school Gmail.

Last week, I was working with a friend who is knee-deep in love with the app, and I decided to give it another shot. Six days down, today, I’ve decided to bid adieu to the sexiest thing that ever happened to my inbox. Again!

99.9% of my email is Bullshit, but it’s the other 0.1% I care about

Mailbox is awesome. It mixes child-level interactivity in my inbox with the kind of sophisticated intelligence that I hadn’t even dreamt of with vanilla Gmail. And that’s where the problem starts…

Email is broken. My email, doubly so. 99.9% of my inbox is filled with random junk, spam, and irrelevant conversations that I really don’t care about. But then there’s the 0.1% that, to me, means the difference between life and death.

Somewhere between that special offer from Amazon I don’t care about and the pointless update from the newsletter I don’t read, lie those status updates from Engineering, threshold alerts from our server monitors, and occasional cries for help from our customers. And I can’t afford to miss these. If that means I have to painstakingly sift through miles deep of garbage from the Nigerian prince looking to transfer his wealth, I will do it.

Remind me later doesn’t mean don’t remind me Now!

When I started using Mailbox this time, I loved the swipes and gestures. Swipe to trash, swipe to archive, swipe, swipe, swipe to freedom.

I swiped through my emails — legal stuff, paper work, product stuff — sending them to piles of reminders, trash cans and to-do lists before relaxing with a cup of coffee and my new found efficiency. Until today, when I found a whole bunch of stuff that people had already responded to — stuff that I needed to look at asap, but didn’t because I’d asked Mailbox to “auto-swipe” them somewhere along the way.

My process may be broken, but hey — it works!

The reason I live with a crappy inbox is not because I love it. It’s because my email is far too critical for me to stop and change the wheels, and it’s impossible to change my behavior when the car is on the drive. Mailbox is beautiful. It’s the way email should have been — it’s the way email should be. But if it means missing a single mail thread somewhere, that’s not a risk I’m willing to take.

I’d rather sift through 99.9% of crap with an unintelligent inbox than risk losing a single email in the filters of an intelligent one.

There’s a reason why creating a filter in Gmail is so damn hard — if I’m setting up a rule to send something to the trash, I better know exactly what I’m doing.

Sure, chances are I wasn’t using Mailbox and it’s brilling auto-swipes the right way. Chances are, if I gave it the time it needed, my inbox could have become a million times more efficient. But unless it gives me the blind confidence of my vanilla Gmail, I’m uninstalling Mailbox for now (and no, I’m not yet playing the risk with Inbox yet either).

You can’t beat the status quo unless you match the status quo

When you’re in the early stages of running a startup, everything looks like a sign from above. You start reading meaning and deriving insights from the most insignificant things around you.

To me, my experience with Mailbox reaffirms something I’ve always believed in with germ.io — you can’t beat the status quo until you match the status quo. Be it the clunky interface of a decade old messaging protocol that Mailbox tries to kick, or the tactile, free-flowing experience of ideating on pen and paper that we’re trying to organize.

Mailbox is a beautiful beautiful app. But it just misses one thing that my vanilla Gmail gave me — the confidence that I was master of my inbox. And, to me, that’s more important that any amount of oomph and genius you could pump in.