Will Mailbox change how your subscribers respond to their email?
If the waitlist for Mailbox taught us anything, it's that there's no shortcuts to success in this life. After languishing for weeks in their famous 'reservations' queue like everyone else, we finally got our chance to test out this new iOS email client for Gmail accounts. But, was the wait worth it?
The hype surrounding Mailbox has been impossible to escape. There's been breathless commentary on geek blogs. A six-figure waitlist. Numerous side-by-side comparisons with Gmail, which also has its own stripped-down mobile email app with push notifications. Even parodies, thanks to MailappApp. However, what's been missing from the conversation is how Mailbox is bound to impact HTML email designers and senders, like you and I. So, we took the first opportunity presented to run this mobile email client through our barrage of CSS support tests, to find out if it was as trouble-free for our crowd as it aims to be for email recipients.
What's in the 'box?
Everyone, breathe - the great news is that Mailbox is going to be the least of your worries when designing email for mobile devices. What became immediately clear during our initial tests is that it's powered by WebKit - or some variation thereof. As a result, it breezed through our CSS2 and CSS3 tests, just as other major WebKit clients - iOS Mail and Android default Mail - have.
Likewise, Mailbox supports media queries, which opens this client up to the responsive email techniques that we know and love. Even Google Web Fonts get the nod. This is in stark contrast to Gmail for iOS, which suffers from CSS support that's on par with its parent webmail client, including no media query support. Mailbox also displays email messages wall-to-wall (at least, when the email hasn't been threaded in a conversation), which is in contrast to the weird padding Gmail adds to the sides of each and every message. I think you get the idea - from a sender's perspective, Mailbox and Gmail for iOS are in no way comparable.
For enquiring minds, it goes to show that it isn't something in Gmail's opaque cloud that's disabling incoming HTML emails, it's the Gmail client itself that's selectively stripping out CSS.
Other niceties that set Mailbox apart from other mobile email clients are no email truncation over a cellular connection and that images are displayed by default. See? We can all rest easy now.
Does send time matter anymore?
A well-publicized part of Mailbox are the options it provides to 'snooze' or 'postpone' an email message (pictured above). It's a clever idea - often, not all of the messages in your inbox need to be responded to at once and having a seemingly-full inbox of 'things to-do later' can be an unwelcome mental overhead. What makes this idea particularly interesting to senders is that it undermines theories on the importance of send time to the success of an email campaign. While we've never considered send time to be a critical factor, to those who see the science behind sending at 9am on a Tuesday, the ability to postpone email must seem like a potential quandry. However, it's an unstoppable shift - now email clients have grown from being humble message buckets, into fully-fledged productivity and collaboration tools too, it's increasingly likely that email recipients will choose to read email on their terms, not when senders personally feel they have the best chance of getting their messages read.
Time will tell if we start seeing subscribers frequently opening their emails in the hours, or days following a send, especially if this idea gathers steam amongst other clients. More than ever, email creators should focus on generating engagement; on creating messages that are compelling enough to be responded to now, not filed away for later (or, forever).
We invited the Mailbox team to comment on the state of mobile email and how they hope to influence reading habits, so there may well be an update to this post in the days ahead. But in the interim, we'd love to hear your experiences with Mailbox.
Have you given this new mobile email client a try? Will it change how we read email? Let us know in the comments below.
14th March
I’ve been using Mailbox as my main client for almost a month now, and I have noticed a change in the way I manage and read emails.
I’ve noticed I quickly archive more marketing emails without ever opening them (obviously a problem for our industry) while I spend more time reading and answering emails from people on my phone instead of my computer.
In short, the zero-inbox approach combined with fast archiving and email-snoozing means marketing emails have to pass a split second subject test to even make it to my ‘check it later’ inbox, where I’ll give the subject a second glance then decide if its worth reading.
Start testing more subjects!
14th March
Still 13,000 people in front of me. Mailstrom has been a good aid to me, though, in getting my inbox into shape in the meantime.
14th March
Great post Ros. My tests showed some weird stuff happening with my responsive designs. I’ll have to take a second look.
15th March
What supernath said “I’ve noticed I quickly archive more marketing emails without ever opening them (obviously a problem for our industry) while I spend more time reading and answering emails from people on my phone instead of my computer.”
This is exactly what I’ve started doing with Mailbox. Almost no longer reading newsletters. Big issue to think about. The goal is to clear the inbox as quickly as possible, which means reading as little as possible.
18th March
Its good to know that from a HTML E-mail point of view this new client won’t cause any headaches.
I only recently got access to it after “queuing” for it.
I don’t believe an app can improve the email experience. Its the user and how they use an app. Any user that wants to manager their email effectively and have inbox zero will do so, in any email client. This app is just a craze.
15th April
The app is nice but it’s just overhyped and overrated. Didn’t change my life as they were suggesting. Missing a lot of things to make a complete switch to it. I’m never able to achieve the 0 inbox effect as i have too much email to sort through. Right now I’m using both Gmail App and mailbox.
18th April
After trying it for a week, early on, I didn’t get it. Like many others I decided it was overhyped and I had the nothing-can-solve-my-email-volume-woes attitude towards it.
I fired it up again about a month ago to gave it another chance. I don’t know if this will last over time, but I really am at inbox zero daily now. I’m now addicted to the “You’re all done” screen.
The amount of “snoozed” emails is definitely growing, albeit slowly, and could be a similar headache as it approaches some kind of critical mass, but for now I am a believer.
Do I read less marketing emails? Yes, but I find myself engaging in the marketing emails I do want to read even more now, as I can schedule them to be read later.
18th April
For me Mailbox is overhyped. Yep it’s got some fancy gestures, but the readability of the lists is poor compared to the iOS gmail app and no priority inbox (yes, I know that want you to use their time based / action system).
I tried it again last night and the email rendering wasn’t that great on some newsletters i tested.
IMO Sparrow was the leader… but got bought out by the Google - so maybe some to the Sparrow goodness will end up in gmail… one day.
18th April
@supernath - I think you’ve summed up the way I’ve been using mailbox since joining the club a month or two ago.
I also find I don’t write many emails from within mailbox. My work flow is something like:
Use mailbox to delete, archive (and occasionally save for later) from home / the beach / the pooper.
Then anything left in the inbox, I respond to when I’m at my desk, behind a larger screen.
27th April
We’ve run into a headache with Mailbox.
Media queries are supported, which is great, but it appears redefining table elements with `display:block` doesn’t work.
We’ve been using this successfully in our templates to make a simple two-column layout rewrap to one-column on mobile. Without table styling, our media query styles are half-applied, resulting in a whole new kind of broken.
This is nearly impossible to debug, my guess is that Mailbox is stripping the doctype which triggers a known Webkit rending bug with table display.
Ugh.
30th April
Hey @Joe — did you end up fixing your issue? Redefining table elements with display: block does work as far as I’ve tested, but redefining table CELLS did not. Perhaps you have a different issue?
Anyway I ran some tests on Mailbox and figured out a method that works.
http://emailwizardry.nightjar.com.au/2013/04/16/how-does-mailbox-app-render-responsive-html-emails/
15th May
Looks interesting. It won’t affect me yet as most of my subscribers are corporate and Government types, but I’d like to get my hands on it to experiment.
Shame there’s no Android app yet.