Mailbox, now in portrait mode on your iPad

You asked, we listened (again). Mailbox for iPad now supports portrait mode, so twist to your heart’s content. 

And for those of you who have been patiently waiting for landscape support on iPhone, stay tuned. We haven’t forgotten about you :)

Download Mailbox Today

Mailbox, now on your iPad

You asked, we listened. Mailbox is now available for iPad, so you can swipe your way to inbox zero on all your iOS devices.

Mailbox now available without the wait

Good news! Mailbox is now available without having to wait in line. After 10 weeks of around-the-clock hard work, our engineering team has scaled the Mailbox service to deliver over 100 million messages per day (and growing). We believe we can now confidently handle new users as they sign up, so we’ve pulled down the reservation system. 

There’s also a new version of Mailbox in the App Store with lots of little bits of goodness, from faster swiping to smarter snoozes. 

Thanks to our amazing users for the oodles of emails and tweets with valuable feedback — we’re so grateful you’ve taken the time to share your thoughts and help us track down issues. 

We’ll continue to use your feedback to shape the product — together we’re making Mailbox better and better. 

A Million Mailboxes and More

It’s been another big week for Mailbox! 

First, we’re up and running in our new office and the Dropbox family is making us feel welcome and inspired! We’re so fortunate to call Dropbox home. 

Second, we’re thrilled to announce that we filled our 1 millionth reservation today, only 6 weeks to the day after launching Mailbox. We’re pretty proud of our team and all the hard work it’s taken to scale up so quickly. 

And third, today we’re releasing an update to Mailbox in the App Store. Among hundreds of fixes and improvements big and small, we’ve added shake to undo—the feature our users asked for most. You can download the version here if you haven’t already updated.  

We’re as committed as ever to get Mailbox in the hands of everyone who wants it. For those of you still waiting for your Mailbox, please stay tuned — the line continues to get faster every day. And thanks again for all the support and feedback — we’re grateful to have you with us on this journey. 

— Team Mailbox

To Grow Even Faster, Mailbox is Joining Dropbox

Mailbox is on a roll. Since launching last month, our service capacity has grown 2000x and we’re already delivering more than 60 million emails a day. That’s mind-bending growth for only a few weeks, and we’re just getting started.

We can’t wait to put Mailbox in the hands of everyone who wants it. This means not only continuing to scale the service, but also including support for more email providers and mobile devices. Add to that a host of new features and we’ve got a LOT of work to do, certainly more than our current team of 14 can handle. We need to grow and we need to grow thoughtfully, with top-notch people who share our goals and values.

Enter Dropbox, the team from San Francisco who helps over 100M people bring their photos, docs, and videos with them anywhere. They’re a profoundly talented bunch who build great tools that make work frictionless, and Mailbox fits Dropbox’s mission like a glove. Plus, they’ve got a ton of experience scaling services and are experts at handling people’s data with care. In short, Dropbox is our kind of company.

Rather than grow Mailbox on our own, we’ve decided to join forces with Dropbox and build it out together. To be clear, Mailbox is not going away. The product needs to grow fast, and we believe that joining Dropbox is the best way to make that happen. Plus, imagine what cool things you could do if your Mailbox was connected to your Dropbox…

So hold onto your hats, because our time together is just getting started. And thanks again for joining us on the journey to transform the inbox. We’re really excited for what’s ahead.

— The Mailbox Team (now a proud part of the Dropbox Team)

We’re Ramping Up

Scaling at Mailbox continues in earnest, and the line is moving faster every day.

During its first week Mailbox delivered 50 million emails. Currently, the service is delivering 50 million emails every day. That is an incredible number for a brand new app. For comparison’s sake, Twitter took three years to reach the number of daily messages that Mailbox reached in less than four weeks. Of course, Twitter’s network started from scratch while Mailbox taps into an existing fire hose. Nevertheless, it’s been a massive undertaking to scale 40x faster without a fail whale to lean on. 

A critical part of Mailbox scaling is its brand new infrastructure. Mailbox relies on servers in the cloud to do things like send push notifications, download email as fast as possible, and handle “snoozed” messages. Software that is server-based is susceptible to being overloaded, and we want to keep this from happening. This is email, after all, and it needs to work reliably. This is why we still have a line. If you’re waiting in line, know that we’re working as hard as possible to get Mailbox in your hands soon.

As we continue to scale, we’re also hard at work on new product features and growing our user support. To this end, user feedback continues to be incredibly helpful. Thanks for letting us know what you love, what you don’t, and what you want for your Mailbox. It’s making a difference.

Simple Answers to Common Questions

Back in the Saddle: Week 1 in Review

It’s been a wild, adrenaline-charged week for Mailbox. Since going live in the App Store last Thursday, a lot has happened.

First things first: today was rough. After seeing intermittent sync issues last night, the Mailbox system ground to a halt this morning. No one could check mail, and we decided to pause the line. Our first priority is to ensure a reliable experience for people using the app, so the downtime was especially hard. The press responded with stories of the outage. Support requests began pouring in. It was the kind of day a startup fears most.

But here we are — Mailboxes are syncing and reservations are being filled. Many of you have written to us with encouragement and understanding, and we’re humbled and inspired by your response. Thank you.

So what’s next? You might notice that the line is moving more slowly compared to yesterday. Today’s outage was related to certain infrastructure limits, and reducing the rate of new users temporarily will help us address them quickly. We know that so many of you are eager to give Mailbox a try, and we’ll continue working around the clock until you can. 

Finally, this week has been mind-bending in terms of numbers, so we thought we’d share some of those too. While we’ve been fixing bugs, optimizing our back-end to handle massive amounts of data, and sharing high-fiving kittens on Twitter, you all have been swiping and emailing at an eye-popping pace.

You may recall that before last Thursday Mailbox was only in a small number of hands (iOS betas are strictly limited in terms of total devices). On the first day, we stretched to fill 1,000 reservations. Tonight we filled reservation #150,000. In this first week, Mailbox delivered over 50 million emails, and together we’ve reached zero inbox a jaw-dropping 400,000 times. 

So that’s week 1. We’ve got a long way to go. And we’re so excited to have you with us. Thank you for joining us on this journey to transform how we interact with email.

The Mailbox Team

We’re experiencing sync issues —please stay tuned.

We’re currently seeing intermittent issues with our servers syncing mail. We’ve paused filling reservations so that we can focus on a fix.

If you’re currently using Mailbox, you’re most likely seeing a message that says “Having trouble connecting, please try again soon.” Don’t worry, any messages that you take action on or any new emails you create should not be lost. Once we have resolved the issue your Mailbox will simply update and process all actions you’ve taken inside the app.

The team is working on resolving this now, and we’ll let you know as soon as we’re filling reservations again. We hope to get things moving shortly.

Thank you for your patience,

The Mailbox Team

How we’re rolling out Mailbox

Now that we’ve begun filling reservations for Mailbox, we’d like to share what we expect the rollout to look like.

Mailbox relies on servers in the cloud to do things like send push notifications, make downloading email as fast as possible, and handle snoozed messages. Software that is server-based is susceptible to being overloaded and we want to keep this from happening. This is email, after all, and it needs to work reliably. 

We’ve designed the Mailbox service to scale indefinitely, and have done as much load testing as we can. But we don’t know what we don’t know, so we’re using reservations to add people gradually. 

At first, the pace may seem slow. This is by design. If we run into unexpected snags, we may even stop filling reservations temporarily. But as the service grows, we should be able to dramatically increase this pace until we no longer need a reservation system at all. 

This is familiar territory: it’s how many of the services you probably use today (including Gmail) were initially taken to market. Keep an eye on this blog and use the app’s built-in counter to chart the line’s progress. We’ll have your Mailbox ready as soon as we can.