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Mailbox app finally arrives on the iPad's larger screen

Mailbox, the much loved email-sorting app, is available as a free download from the iTunes Store. 

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Mailbox
Mailbox, the popular email app, has finally landed on the iPad.
  • By Matthew Shaer

Earlier this year, Mailbox, an e-mail app developed by the team at Orchestra, was acquired by Dropbox for an undisclosed sum. Since then, the software has received rave reviews – "the best email app we've ever used," wrote one site – and racked up a million iPhone and iPod Touch users. And now, the app is finally coming to the iPad. 

Beginning today, you can download an iPad version of Mailbox from the iTunes store, free of charge.

Mailbox's motto is "put email in its place," and the platform is designed to make it easy to scan, file, and store multiple e-mails. A small swipe rightward across the screen archives an e-mail, while a full swipe deletes it; a small swipe to the left saves the message for later. As John Brownlee of Cult of Mac wrote in his glowing review of the software, the whole thing sounds simple, but it allows you to fly through your inbox at a pretty rapid clip. 

"When there are poor tools people feel inundated and out of control and so they react by hating the thing that's oppressing them," Mailbox CEO Gentry Underwood told CNET in an interview this week. "[W]e want to replace that and by doing so replace the feeling of being overwhelmed with peace of mind." 

So is the iPad version of the software any good? Well, yes, writes Jill Duffy of PC Mag, although it's far from perfect – for instance, the software only supports Gmail accounts. 

"The layout of the iPad app takes advantage of the larger screen well, although it doesn't work in portrait orientation," Ms. Duffy writes. "If you like the Mailbox experience on the iPhone, it's definitely worth installing on an iPad, too. Having a consistent way to process email across those two platforms is a step in the right direction. Without support for other email hosting services, though, or the ability to process messages in bulk, Mailbox for iPad's appeal remains somewhat limited." 

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut.

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