The first thing I did after becoming a smartphone owner in late 2009 was check my email. There were no new messages when I checked that morning, but that didn't matter: After years of using feature phones, nothing seemed more exciting to me than just having the option to check my email on the go. Over time, though, this proved to be more of a curse than a blessing to my email inbox.

I've never considered myself the most digitally organized person, but even I noticed my inbox spiral out of control after getting a smartphone as my friends and I started sending each other more messages and I forwarded myself more articles, tweets and reminders for work.

Within a few months, I went from having hundreds of unread messages at any given time to thousands. Even the best email apps on the market only made it easier to check and send messages, not to organize them.

That's why my ears perked up a couple months ago when I first heard about Mailbox, an as yet unreleased iPhone app from Orchestra — the startup behind the popular to-do list app of the same name — which promised to help users keep their inbox at zero by introducing a scheduling option for when to read and respond to incoming messages.

So for instance, you can opt to have a message resent to your inbox later that night when you get home from work or over the weekend when you have more time to respond.

Prior to this, the only real options for email were to respond immediately or let it sit in your inbox; Mailbox offered a third way. I'm not usually one to get antsy for the launch of an app, but I found myself pinning all hopes for a better future for my inbox on Mailbox — and it looks like I'm not the only one.

The company posted a teaser video (see below) for the app in mid-December, which was viewed 250,000 times in the first day and has since racked up more than 600,000 views. Meanwhile, about 70,000 people have signed up to be on the waiting list for the app. It will still be another "few weeks" before Mailbox hits Apple's App Store, but on Tuesday the company launched a formal reservation system on its website and plans to start rolling out the app to those who sign in the order that they signed up. (The reason for the staggered roll out is just to make sure that there are no server issues with the app as more people sign up.)

So does the app live up to all the hype? I've been testing Mailbox for the past few days and the app is definitely better than any other app on the market in helping to manage the flow of emails, but there is still room for improvement.

Mailbox: Designed For Mobile First

Mailbox certainly isn't the first app that has tried to improve on Apple's default email application. Both Sparrow and Gmail launched on the iPhone to plenty of hype, adding more bells and whistles to the standard email app. But the goal of Mailbox isn't just to make Apple's email app better, it's to rethink email for mobile all together.

"For the most part, apps that exist have tried to cram an existing desktop experience into a mobile phone. That's not a very effective way of building a good tool," said Gentry Underwood, CEO of Orchestra. "I think most people have a poor email experience on the phone and are hungry for something better."

Perhaps the biggest difference between checking email on mobile and desktop is that on mobile, people are performing what Underwood calls "triage," meaning they are just trying to make quick decisions about how to handle their messages while away from their desktop.

With that in mind, the team at Orchestra set out to build an app that makes it easier for users to sort messages as they come in. The centerpiece of Mailbox is a feature called "snooze" that lets users swipe across a message in their inbox to schedule being reminded about it at a later date.

When you take this step, the message is removed from your main inbox and placed in a separate folder (think of it as your Read It Later folder) and it will be re-sent to your inbox at the designated time or date.

In addition to scheduling messages, you can also use Mailbox to organize email on the go by swiping to add messages to one of several built-in lists, including "to watch," "to read" and "to buy." Each of these lists also show up as folders in Gmail. All of these features are intended to keep your inbox uncluttered without actually deleting incoming messages.

How Mailbox Compares to Other Email Apps

Sparrow has been my go-to app for the iPhone pretty much since it launched last March — though I will sometimes rely on the Gmail app just to search through old messages and sorting my inbox lists. Sparrow's strength, in my eyes, is that it has intuitive swipe gestures, displays my many Gmail labels, makes it easy to manage multiple email accounts and adds pictures for each of my contacts, all of which somehow make the inbox feel a little more personal and pleasant to deal with.

Mailbox, on the other hand, is missing some of the simpler perks that come with Sparrow and other email apps. You can't see your Gmail lists, or swipe to send messages to an existing Gmail list, which would be very useful for staying organized. You can't add pictures to your contacts, like you can with Sparrow. And there is also no option to select multiple emails at once as you can with Gmail or Apple's mail app, though that's mainly because Mailbox is designed to handle each message as it comes in.

That said, the app has far more potential than any other on the market as an organizational tool and it improves on some basic features as well. For example, email threads are presented more plainly and all on one page, which makes it easier to track long back-and-forth conversations, and the search functionality is on par with Gmail.

Ultimately, the selling point of the app is a single feature — scheduling — which raises the question of what would happen if other competing apps simply decide to copy this feature. Underwood acknowledged this was a potential risk in our interview. "Once you create something that's so obvious, it will change what comes down the road," he said. "We're going to need to continue innovating because other people will almost certainly follow."

The Mailbox team already has several big ideas in place for future updates, which focus on using the built-in strengths of mobile to make the email experience better, including finding ways to automate the organizational process, develop new options for users to respond to incoming messages and perhaps incorporate location and other data for scheduling emails. If Mailbox can implement this suite of features, it may just define email for the mobile era.

Not A Cure-All For Your Inbox Blues

The best and worst thing I can say about Mailbox is that it taps into the power of procrastination. I felt a strong sense of relief while using the app just knowing that I had a way to delegate incoming messages for later, but after a few days I found it allowed me to deal with many of my emails by not dealing with them.

In a way, it's fitting that Mailbox refers to its scheduling feature as "snooze." Just as with an alarm, it's nice to have the option to hit snooze once or twice to give yourself a little more time, but there is always the potential for procrastinators like me to abuse this system and mistake the choice to delay being productive for productivity itself.

In the time I've used Mailbox, I've noticed that the number of read and unread messages in my inbox hasn't increased by as much as usual, but I know many additional messages are still hiding out in folders, waiting for a response. Now that we're stuck with email following us everywhere we go, at least we can get a little respite, even if sometimes that means we're just basically playing mind games with ourselves.

Images courtesy of Mailbox