Dropbox acquires email app "it girl" Mailbox

The app has generated so much buzz, users need a reservation to use it

Dropbox is continuing its foray into mobile with its newly announced acquisition of Mailbox, the mobile email app that’s been generating a lot of buzz in the month since it launched. Mailbox’s entire 14-person team will be joining Dropbox, and the app will continue to operate on its own. The financial terms were not disclosed.

“Dropbox doesn’t replace your folders or your hard drive: it makes them better. The same is true with Mailbox. It doesn’t replace your email: it makes it better. Whether it’s your Dropbox or your Mailbox, we want to find ways to simplify your life,” wrote Dropbox founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi in a blog post.

CEO Drew Houston told the Wall Street Journal that the deal came together after the two companies started talking about email attachments a few months ago. While the app will continue to run as a stand-alone app, Dropbox will leverage Mailbox’s technology to enhance its own offerings, like email attachments.

Mailbox, created by Orchestra, launched in February and quickly became the new “It Girl” for a lot of techies and bloggers due to the ease with it organizes your inbox. You can combine all of your Gmail accounts and view messages separately via different folders, and deleting, archiving, and “snoozing” are as easy as swiping to the left or right. The app also makes it easy to set messages aside to respond to later, with reminders set for Later Today, Tomorrow, Next Week, and so on.

The app got such a heavy barrage of people wanting to use it that the app ran into some server problems. Consequently, it created “reservations” which allowed people to download the app and find themselves placed on a list. Some 1.3 million people have downloaded the app and made reservations, and the company is now delivering 60 million email messages a day.

“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,” the Mailbox team wrote in its own blog post.

Orchestra has raised $5 million in financing from Charles River Ventures, SV Angel, Kapor Capital, and CrunchFund.

Dropbox, which some investors have valued at $4 billion, now has 100 million users and 250 employees.