Mailbox

The email app with the famous reservation queue, bought by Dropbox for about $100 million and shut down three years later

Shut down
19902026

Mailbox was an iPhone email app built by Orchestra, Inc. and released on 7 February 2013, famous for a reservation system that made hundreds of thousands of people wait in a numbered queue for access. It introduced swipe-to-archive and snooze-until-later to a wide audience. Dropbox bought the company in March 2013 in a deal reported at around $100 million, added Android and Mac versions, and shut Mailbox down on 26 February 2016.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2013
  2. 7 February 2013 Launch
    Mailbox launches on iPhone

    With the reservation queue.

  3. 15 March 2013 Acquisition
    Dropbox buys Orchestra

    Reported at around $100 million.

  4. April 2013 Feature
    iPad version and the end of the queue
  5. 2014
  6. April 2014 Feature
    Android app and a Mac beta
  7. 2015
  8. 7 December 2015 Shutdown announced
    Dropbox announces the closure

    Carousel goes a month later.

  9. 2016
  10. 26 February 2016 Shutdown
    Mailbox shuts down

The site through time

Browse mailboxapp.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2013 2014 2015 2016 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Orchestra, Inc. 2013–2013 Founded Gentry Underwood and Scott Cannon; Mailbox was the second product
Dropbox 2013–2016 Acquisition, $100M Reported at around $100 million

Key figures [edit]

MetricValueAs ofConfidence
Registered accounts 380,000 7 February 2013 Reported Reservations in the queue before launch

Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Dropbox announced on 7 December 2015 that Mailbox would shut down on 26 February 2016, along with the photo app Carousel. Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi wrote that the team had concluded there was only so much an email app could do to fix email, and that Dropbox would rather remove the work that generates email in the first place.

Our analysis: Mailbox was a beautifully made answer to a question Dropbox stopped wanting to ask. The swipe gestures and the snooze button were genuinely new in 2013 and were copied into Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail within two years, which removed the reason to install a third-party client. Dropbox had bought a team, not a product, and once that team was needed elsewhere the app had no defenders. The reservation queue that made Mailbox famous also set the trap: it trained everyone to expect a waiting list, then delivered an app that could not survive its imitators.

History [edit]

The queue

Orchestra, Inc. had made a to-do app that nobody used. Its second attempt, Mailbox, was an iPhone client for Gmail built around three ideas: swipe right to archive, swipe left to snooze a message until later, and treat the inbox as a list you empty rather than a pile you keep. It launched on 7 February 2013 with a reservation system: you downloaded the app, took a number, and watched a counter of how many people were ahead of you. Over 380,000 reservations built up, the queue became the story, and inbox zero became a thing people said out loud.

Dropbox bought Orchestra in March 2013, reported at around $100 million. Mailbox lost the queue, gained an iPad version in April 2013, an unlimited launch, and later a Mac beta and an Android app. Gentry Underwood ran it inside Dropbox and the team kept shipping.

Everyone copied the swipe

The problem was that the ideas were easy to copy and hard to own. Google put snoozing into Inbox and then into Gmail, Apple put swipe actions into Mail, Microsoft bought Acompli and turned it into Outlook Mobile with the same gestures. A third-party client that needs your email password had to be much better than the default, and by 2015 it was not.

On 7 December 2015 Dropbox announced that Mailbox would close on 26 February 2016 and Carousel on 31 March, and that the teams were moving to collaboration work. The Mac beta was never finished. The shutdown was clean: reminders in the app, a data export, and a blog post that admitted the company had decided email was not the problem it wanted to solve.

The domain today

mailboxapp.com redirects to dropbox.com. The snooze button it popularised is now standard in Gmail and Outlook.

Similar projects

Yahoo Groups Where the internet organised itself 2001–2020 Inbox by Gmail The better Gmail that Gmail ate 2014–2019 Windows Live Mail The free desktop mail program that replaced Outlook Express, cut off from Outlook.com in 2016 and left to die in 2017 2007–2017 Wunderlist The to-do app Microsoft bought to bury 2010–2020 Vine Six seconds, looped forever 2013–2017 Half.com It once bought a whole town for its name 2000–2017

Sources [edit]

  1. Dropbox will shut down Mailbox in February 2016 and Carousel in March TechCrunch 7 December 2015 [archived]
  2. Mailbox (application) Wikipedia 1 January 2024 [archived]
  3. Mailbox's first app, Orchestra To-Do, is shutting down TechCrunch 26 July 2013 [archived]
  4. Dropbox is dropping Mailbox TechRadar 8 December 2015 [archived]
  5. Dropbox just killed Mailbox Inc. 8 December 2015 [archived]

Last verified: 18 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).