Postbox — a new take on email?

Postbox is a new application for managing email. It has some serious competition to deal with, like Outlook, Thunderbird and Apple Mail. Postbox does mail in an intuitive and fast way, which makes it easy to manage messages and actually get things done. Their website sums it up quite well.

“Postbox is a new way to manage online communication. It lets you spend less time managing messages and more time getting things done.”

“Postbox lets you organize your mail by topic so you can focus on one thing at a time.”

“Postbox works behind the scenes to catalog everything in your email.”

“Once you’ve found it, you can really start doing things. Postbox is designed to break down barriers. Any mail content can be annotated or combined with information from the web to create new mail messages.”

The application itself seems to be based on the upcoming Thunderbird 3, judging by the looks alone. This means that it benefits from all great things from the Mozilla suite, such as great spam filtering, clean looks, tabs and client certificate support for IMAP. It does however mean that it uses the XUL interface, which in itself isn’t a bad thing, but it does not integrate very well into the Mac environment.

Looking at the main window reveals a wealth of information. To quickly view attachments, images, links and contacts there is a shortcut bar on the tab bar itself.

The application puts a big focus on tags, or Topics as they are called in the application. It is very easy to add and view Topics. Having Topics on messages makes it very easy to find messages relating to different projects or keeping on top on what to do next.

One of the cool new features is the ability to annotate messages. This makes it possible to edit email and add your own text and title to it. Then you can either replace the original message or create a copy.

Messages are threaded in a beautiful Gmail style view, sorted chronologically. On the top a list of included authors are displayed for an easy overview.

I will post a review later when I have had time to try it out for a few weeks. It looks promising, but it has to fill some great big shoes if it will replace Apple Mail as my default email application.

Postbox is currently in closed beta, but add your name to their waiting list and you will be notified when it is available for download.

[Postbox]