"It’s time to put email in its place."

This is the teaser page for Mailbox, a new product by the Orchestra team. I can’t say too much yet, but I’ve seen what they’re up to (we are investors, after all). It’s potentially game changing when it comes to email. And those who follow my email saga closely will know that I would not say that lightly.

They have a bit more about the process of evolving from Orchestra to Mailbox here. The best excerpt:

At first the idea seemed crazy. Email felt like this massive thing that startups don’t mess with. “This path is paved with corpses,” one friend told us. To be really blunt, we were scared. But as we explored the idea and the capacity of our team to tackle it, we felt emboldened. We realized we could apply everything we had learned about building fast, friendly, mobile collaboration tools to the inbox. We can’t replace email, but we can change how we interact with it.

Bingo. It’s not about replacing email. That has been tried and tried and tried and failed and failed and failed. It’s about changing the way we perceive email.

Mailbox is not quite done yet, but it will be worth the wait. Trust me.

This is intriguing, to say the least. “Solving” email is somewhere between a better mousetrap and a unicorn.