Mailbox Launches Public Beta for Mac

Announced back in April, Mailbox for Mac is out today as a public beta for those who signed up to receive access. Ellis Hamburger has a preview for The Verge:

Mailbox still has plenty of work to do, even on the homefront. There are lots of bugs in the Mailbox for Mac beta, and there are still more email services to add like Exchange and Yahoo, which Underwood says his team is thinking about. But, much as Sparrow did before it, Mailbox is paving the way towards a future where email works faster, syncs instantly between all your devices, and just acts more like the other modern communication apps we use today.

From the preview, Mailbox for Mac already looks pretty great. The “snooze to device” feature sounds genius, and I like the fact that everything (including drafts) sync fast across devices.

Unfortunately, Mailbox is another app I can’t use on a daily basis. The app is still limited to iCloud and Gmail, whereas our email runs on IMAP and Exchange. It’s not clear whether Mailbox will support IMAP in the future, and I don’t think I’ll ever go back to Gmail.

Mailbox is also using a “betacoin” system to handle access to the beta: users who got an invitation today received three images of golden coins, which they can share with other users to let them use the beta.