“When one door closes another door opens, but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.”
This quote from Alexander Graham Bell, is meant to positive and illustrate the fact that we can’t linger too long in the past, especially when there is a brighter future right in front of us.
I just recently learned that the email productivity app, Mailbox, will be shutting down in the near future and to be honest, I was a little shocked. I mean, these guys were acquired by Dropbox for a reported $100M, they must have been on to something with their email solution, right? But, while I’m being honest here, I also wasn’t entirely surprised, for a number of reasons that I’ll try to explain now.
First and foremost, I’d like to point out the obvious – a disclaimer of sorts: Mailbox was a direct competitor to Timyo in the “email productivity” department, but I’m not writing this article to jump for joy at their closure, or tear apart their app, feature by feature, or even gloat about our own app in any way. I simply wanted to write an article that voices my opinion on why I think they are closing down their app and how Timyo addresses some of those shortcomings.
Okay, with that out of the way, I’d like to share another quote, but this one is taken from the official Mailbox App page in their goodbye statement:
“But as we deepened our focus on collaboration, we realized there’s only so much an email app can do to fundamentally fix email. We’ve come to believe that the best way for us to improve people’s productivity going forward is to streamline the workflows that generate so much email in the first place.”
Now this statement, I wholeheartedly agree with! There is only so much that an email app can do, or at least an email app that follows the standard conventions of email: you send email, people respond, you receive email, you sift through email, you sort, repeat. There truly is only so much that can be done with that system and it seems like the focus with the current crop of email productivity apps, including Mailbox, is to try and improve the sorting features, not to address the root of the problem, which is: too much ambiguous or useless email that requires the receivers attention.
Forget about “Inbox Zero”
At Timyo, we don’t always agree on everything that we are doing with the app. Maybe some features have gone one way or another (and of course there are always a ton more features to add,) but we do all agree on the simple, core feature of Timyo. By allowing an email sender to be specific and clear about what they expect from you, the receiver, we can save everyone a lot of time. A lot of time not sorting, a lot of time not responding (“okay, got it!”), a lot of time that is otherwise drained by email that just doesn’t matter to you.
Mailbox really wanted to help users reach “Inbox Zero,” but for some (most!) this is a very daunting task. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to even think about the thousands of emails I have never even looked at. I didn’t look at them, because when I saw them come in, I knew right away that they were not important. Mailbox offered a popular “snooze” feature, that allowed you to reach inbox zero, kind of, at least until all those snoozed emails came back, knocking on your proverbial door and looking to take up more of your time – again!
Save time with Timyo
With Timyo, we do offer a very useful way for you to sort and prioritize the email that matters to you, but the real power of Timyo comes when your friends and colleagues use it as well. Instead of requiring the receiver to open, digest, then prioritize the emails coming in, Timyo users will receive their email already sorted and prioritized by day. This allows you to focus on what is important today and still be aware of what you have coming up in the following weeks – it truly is a time saver!
Mailbox was actually a well-designed and useful app, if all you wanted to do was continue dealing with all of your email, all of the time. But as that door closes, why not focus on a new app and a new idea that is right in front of you? Give Timyo a try.
If you loved Mailbox, you will love Timyo and our similar features. If you left Mailbox, we think you will love Timyo as well, because of our different features! It’s free and easy to install, just like Mailbox, so what are you waiting for?
We are on a mission. Timyo may not have everything right just yet either, but we are sure that if people start using Timyo and shifting their email habits to think like we do, we can save the world a whole lot of time.
