Boxy 2 Is a Beautiful Inbox From the Mac Gmail Client
There are many options when it comes to email clients. I have been using Boxy for the last week. Initially launched in late 2015, the company released its second version last week, which adds a lot of new features to the original product while keeping what people loved about the company’s original offering.
Boxy only works with Gmail (or Google Apps accounts), so if you don’t have a Gmail account, you are SUNNY when it comes to using the program.
If you’ve already been a Boxy user, here’s what’s new in version 2:
- Updated white theme and new crimson theme.
- Saved Searches. If you find yourself constantly looking for the same thing in your inbox, now with Boxy you can save some of those searches to speed up the process.
- Global notifications. The latest version of the app has an updated notification system that can send you notifications for all of your accounts associated with your Boxy account.
- New status bar menu for quick viewing and access to your accounts
- Brand new multi-account system. The system is now much faster and more reliable than the previous version when it comes to dealing with multiple accounts.
I’ve never actually tried the original version of the app, but I really enjoyed trying out the second version this week. Basically, if you’re a fan of the Google Inbox app on your phone or on the web, you’ll probably love what Boxy has to offer. The $ 5.99 app is Gmail ‘s Mac client for snoozing emails, pinning important emails, and quickly navigating your inbox. For the most part, it essentially takes Gmail’s Inbox features and brings them into its own web app.
So, most of the features I’m going to cover are also related to Gmail’s Inbox features. It’s just using these functions and running them in a native application on your computer.
Clean, user-friendly design
As with your inbox, images and attachments are automatically retrieved and displayed in line when you read messages, and also appear in your inbox as you scroll.
When I’m not at Lifehacker, I write a lot about drinks and cocktails. What I really liked about the app was that it showed me images of cocktails that were sent to me by bartenders etc. to check them out. I receive tons of emails, and this not only highlights these materials, but also allows me to get a feel for what I am getting myself into even before opening the letter. Sure, opening and scrolling to view images could take an extra 15 seconds, but when you’re talking about a lot of messages, saving that time was pretty great.
The whole experience is quick and clean. I traditionally use the Gmail web client, and this week I felt much more efficient using Boxy when it came to answering my email and viewing my inbox. It’s just that everything happens faster with a native application than on the Internet.
As with the Inbox, individual messages are sometimes also grouped into groups, such as Social or Updates. If you end up with a bunch of newsletters and the like in your inbox, it might be a good idea to go through all the similar things at the same time. If you don’t like this idea, you can also disable this feature.
Emails from the same sender are also grouped. For example, they did this with all the average digests that I receive, but never open. Clicking on one of them shows me all of them, and I can immediately close the entire group, rather than view each message individually.
And if you deal with multiple email accounts on a daily basis, getting notifications from everything while opening the same app is pretty killer. This is a new feature in version 2, the app will notify you when you receive a message in any of your accounts, not just the one you accidentally opened. This is very useful when you are trying to manipulate four email accounts and want to make sure you don’t miss anything, although unfortunately you cannot view all of those mailboxes at the same time.
Emails become case messages
As with Inbox, reading an email opens a message right in your inbox so you never leave it. For example, if I open an email, it stays where it is on the page, just unfolds so I can read it. When I’m done, if I keep scrolling, I’ll be back in my inbox again.
If you mark an open email as Done, it will be removed from your Boxy mailbox and moved to the Done folder. Yes, you can archive messages anywhere, but more often than not, I don’t really want the email to go away, I just want to indicate to myself somehow that I got through with it. The Done options serve this purpose, and to me my inbox looks like a sort of to-do list where I could pick and choose which tasks I would like to work on and then mark items as completed as they were completed instead of having to sift through the pages and pages of my mailbox so as not to miss anything. When it comes to the web client, the Done folder is your archive folder, so you need to be careful when using it in emails that you need to return to later.
Set reminders
Google’s reminder feature also works directly in the app. If you’re like me and have a huge list of things to remember every time you look in your inbox, then this feature might come in very handy.
Again, you can set reminders from just about anywhere (including Gmail’s Inbox), but doing it right in the app is just really fun and effective.
Should you understand this?
It depends a little on how you use email and whether you like what you are using now. For me, this is a step up from the traditional web client and is much faster than using the Internet Inbox. Multi-account support is a great feature if you are mixing work and personal email.
$ 5.99 isn’t a huge price to pay for the software, but you can also get a lot of Boxy’s outstanding features simply by using the Google Inbox web app . If you are not a power email user, the Google web app is likely to be for you.
Boxy $ 5.99 | Mac App Store