Looks like its time for another popular mobile email app to get consumed by a larger tech company. Following Google's acquisition of Sparrow last year, Dropbox and Mailbox have announced this morning that they're joining forces. The news was let loose on the official blogs of both companies, with Mailbox explaining that while it's been working hard to let more users into its service and add new features, there's more work than its 14-member team can handle. The company makes it clear that Mailbox won't be going away, saying that it's teaming up with Dropbox to help grow the product faster than Mailbox's team could by itself.
Mailbox made its debut on iOS earlier this year, and the app gained quite a bit of publicity because of the way that it let users into the service. Rather than immediately letting them join after downloading the iPhone app, Mailbox made users reserve a spot in line so that its servers weren't overwhelmed by a rush of traffic. The queue eventually numbered into the hundreds of thousands. Gentry Underwood, CEO of Mailbox creator Orchestra, told the Wall Street Journal that the Mailbox app has taken 1.3 million reservations in total and is serving up 60 million messages every day.
No specific plans for new features or anything have been revealed quite yet, but both companies seem set on working to get Mailbox into users hands more quickly. A report from the Wall Street Journal claims that Dropbox will eventually use Mailbox's technology to help improve certain features of the Dropbox service, including email attachments. While we'll just have to wait and see exactly what features the two companies end up rolling out in the future, any patient souls that are still in the reservation line for Mailbox are likely happy to hear about this deal. How many of you use Mailbox or Dropbox on your devices?