Mailbird: the courier pigeon of the 21st century
What is with all these references to avian creatures? There is Twitter. Then, there’s Thunderbird, Sparrow and even Hootsuite. Here’s another one promising to be the courier pigeon of today: Mailbird.
Let us welcome the youngest to the nest. Mailbird, which sometimes gets dubbed as the Sparrow of Windows, is now rolling out its first public beta launch this coming April 2. Well, late last year, they launched their private invite-only beta. How was the response? They currently have 2,500 users as of March 25, 2013.
Mailbird told e27 that they will be targeting 100,000 users within the first week of this upcoming beta launch. They will also be providing users with what is now listed as free, with development and a slow roll out of additional features only for paid users. And the biggest update will be the ability to send emails from any account with the “multi-identity” function.
Read also: Meet Mailbird, the Sparrow for Windows
The app, created by a team of eight in Bali, was birthed after a few of their co-founders realized that nothing like Sparrow existed for Windows. The other mainstream email desktop apps for Windows are, of course Outlook and Thunderbird. Though efficient, these look terrible. In all honesty, with regard to interface, Outlook’s UI and UX still lag behind many of the email applications we have seen in the market. It is a very simple but raw and unpolished process.
Ah, the battle of the birds. Thunderbird has its fair share of complaints, and Mozilla decided that it will be not supporting its open source project anymore. Let’s see if Mailbird can catch up with its competitor come August this year when it launches its full release publicly.
The “pro” version, which requires a subscription fee of US$12 per year, will provide users with the following benefits: no advertisements, removable Mailbird signature, a Wingman, multi identity and an unlimited multi account. What is a Wingman? We were supposed to keep it a secret but basically, you can set follow up reminders, provide inbox status and snooze emails for later.
Read also: Create multiple email aliases with email anonymizer tool Maskr
For now, the application will only be on desktop PCs. What about mobile integration? As Mailbird expained, phones running Windows Phone will be something they will look into after their creation rules desktop email for Windows.
There is also a “business” package users can purchase. It comes at a subscription fee of US$9 per year per user for teams of five or more. Benefits are the same as with “pro” users but these “business” users get a discount of 25 percent.
Image Credit: Deuts, Mailbird
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