Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Intuitive Email Management App 'Mailbox' Now Available in App Store
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
My recommendation is to review the last day or so emails to make sure you aren't missing anything, then just archive everything at once. Trust me- you will feel great once you do.
I would actually like to see them slightly shorten the distance of the delete swipe. Right now if you swipe from about 1/3 from the left edge of the screen, you can't swipe long enough to reach delete. So just make it a little shorter, just a fine tuning thing.
While I agree with their engineering decision, it is poorly executed PR wise.
The app should have been launched with (1) "beta" tag firmly in place, (2) give at least a rough conservative estimate as to when user is expected to get the spot, and (3) demo mode so that user can get some idea as to how the app will work.
He's talking about the fact we are being asked to hand over this information to total strangers. Who could abuse their access.
Like say test all these accounts to see who has their gmail as an apple id, amazon id, twitter account etc. with access to someone's mailbox you can cause a lot of mischief. And since all emails are going through them first it would be easy to keep you from seeing the reset emails until its too late.
Case in point: Mat Honan
To be fair... If Mat Honan had 2-Step on that all could have been avoided. You have to take some steps to protect yourself as well.
Was Sparrow routing all messages through a second server that could bottleneck and even crash.
Assuming you want to try to understand (unlike most people who complain about marketing hype without even trying to understand...):
- Everything could be summarize in: Sparrow was an app, Mailbox is a service.
- Sparrow was doing what most email clients were doing: the app on the phone would call the gmail servers when you used the app, nothing else in between. Therefore even if a million people downloaded the app on the first day, the download was made from Apple server, and then the app would connect to Google, no Sparrow server in the middle.
- Mailbox has an app, but the whole thing is a service: think of mailbox servers as a personal assistant, it moves stuff out of your inbox to snooze them, then later access your gmail inbox to replace the snoozed messages. That happens when your app is not even open. The work is done on Mailbox servers. That is a HUGE difference with the way sparrow works
- There isn't a company in the world that can go from 0 users to a million users in a few hours, with the million users sending and receiving hundreds of emails a day, and handle that without a server overloading. Think of those large companies (Apple, AT&T...) when you can start placing orders at 2 in the morning for the new iPhone. Even their millions of dollars and years of experience doesn't prevent the servers from crashing...
- So in order to get things to work smoothly, Mailbox decided to open the access to users progressively, correcting problems as they come and eventually let people in faster and faster when things go smoothly
- With the app store, you can't just make the app available to a thousand users, then another thousand, etc... when you give access to an app, everybody has access. Mailbox had no other way than to let everybody get the app, but not everybody getting the service from day 1.
- Was they didn't do so well, was to explain what I just explained, and for some reasons, lot of people seems to complain about the waiting list to "download the app", when there isn't. The waiting list is to access the service that they're running on their servers.
- On a technical standpoint, the rollout is a brilliant. They just ****ed up in communicating why this was necessary
----------
The business model is pretty standard in the tech world, not sure what seems to confuse some of you:
- They had an idea, they were going to charge a few dollars for it, hoping they could get 100,000+ users
- They created a video, and surprise, a million people watched it and found it brilliant
- Change of strategy: **** it, forget about the 100k users, make it free, try to reach the magic million users mark, and sell the business to Google for $20 millions
it's not rocket science...
----------
who doesn't?
Not sure how you use your inbox, but lot of people (if not most) want to keep in their inbox only the emails that need to be processed in some way (to be replied, to take action from, unread emails...), and file the rest of the emails in a different place where they can still be searched.
How do you achieve that without archiving?
The same way when you get 10 letters in the mail, some need to take actions (bills...), they would stay in your inbox, while some you may want to keep but don't require any action in the near future...
I'd be interested to see exactly how they will pull off IMAP & Exchange support.
If they think for a moment users are going to hand off their logins and passwords to pipe through their servers for use, they have another thing coming.
There is no way on earth anyone in business would offer up such information in order to use an application.
If they think for a moment users are going to hand off their logins and passwords to pipe through their servers for use, they have another thing coming.
There is no way on earth anyone in business would offer up such information in order to use an application.
I use the Gmail app primarily, because I like the labels and and the easier access to all my folders (labels) and such.
I use Mail.app for another lessor used account that I want to keep separate from my Gmail account.
Sigh...
Mailbox authenticates with Gmail via oAuth. What that means is that when you setup Mailbox (or any other oAuth 2.0 application, such as with login via Facebook Connect or Twitter elsewhere), you're never sharing your actual login credentials with Mailbox's servers. Instead, you're talking directly to Google's authentication system, where you're acknowledging Mailbox's request for a limited-scope access token that's expressly tied to the requesting application (in this case, Mailbox).
At no point in the oAuth process is your password handed over to the requesting application. As a result, your concerns about the credentials being used to test other accounts are a non-concern, precisely because they don't have them in the first place.
Could someone abuse oAuth access? Certainly, limited to the confines of the access granted (in this case, access to your emails). But you can also revoke their access with but a single click in your Google account. While you're there, you should also probably setup two-factor authentication as well.
Aside from that, as a strategy goes, it's a fairly poor one. Setting aside the realities of how oAuth + Mailbox work and assuming your scenario played out en masse (which it would), it'd be relatively easy for it to be traced back to Mailbox. First, most large companies monitor transactional email performance. That includes openings. As a result, when it starts to leak out that large numbers of accounts have been accessed and their passwords reset, it'd be relatively easy to determine that there's something funny going on when people say they never receive them, they're not in spam folders, but the emails are tracked as having been opened and the reset links clicked.
Beyond that, given Orchestra's relatively high visibility, there's an inherent danger for them. Coupled with the previous point, the large user base would simply serve to increase the likelihood that someone, somewhere, would figure it out. As a result, the likelihood of even short-term success goes down significantly. Finally, the people behind Orchestra are well-known. More than that, even something as simple as their Apple Developer accounts require tax-identification numbers. Point being, there's a rather overt paper trail leading all the way back to them.
As a conspiracy theory, yours isn't a very good one. oAuth makes it impossible, and common sense undermines even the theoretical musings behind it. If Orchestra wants to make money, they're far better off in both the short and long-term building a quality service.
Crazy to see the demand of this app, but have to say it is worth it for me. Might seem a little gimmicky to some but seeing that inbox zero really keeps me on top of organizing my email. Hope you all get in soon.
Last edited:
It may actually still be 15 per minute. My 8.85 was total average since 48 hours ago.
Seems to be going at 16 per minute ATM.
20-30 per minute? Is it just a guestimate? Cause I just averaged out 17 per minute for the last 5 minutes...which means at most I should have two more days of wait time. Unless some catastrophic failure happens on their end.
No, it was going that fast when I posted a couple hours ago.
Now its back to about 15.