Dropbox buys red-hot mobile email startup Mailbox

It’s been just a few weeks since iOS email app Mailbox launched and already it’s already been snapped up by a larger company. Cloud storage provider Dropbox on Friday said it will acquire Mailbox. The company did not disclose the purchase price.

In total, Mailbox has taken 1.3 million reservations and is processing 60 million emails per day, according to Mailbox’s own blog post Friday. Right now, the app is only available to iOS users who have Gmail accounts. But they eventually want to be more email providers and mobile devices and that’s why they agreed to the Drobox acquisition. To scale the service more quickly they decided to join Dropbox, the company said.

Dropbox co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi wrote on the Dropbox blog that they liked that Mailbox is “simple, delightful and beautifully engineered”:

After spending time with Gentry, Scott, and the team, it became clear that their calling was the same as ours at Dropbox—to solve life’s hidden problems and reimagine the things we do every day. We all quickly realized that together we could save millions of people a lot of pain.

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.

One of the hallmarks of Mailbox’s debut was clever marketing: they put users in a queue and only let in a few at a time. This had the effect of a velvet rope outside an exclusive club, causing hundreds of thousands of people to sign up and wait to be let into the service right away.

But the popularity is also due to a huge problem that almost everyone shares: email. Mailbox is just one of many startups trying to solve the problem of too much email.

This post was updated with background information at 10:24 a.m. PT and again at 10:44 a.m. PT.