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Can Postbox Manage Your Email or Are Other Services, Such As Xobni Stiff Competition?

Based in San Francisco, California, Postbox is a new messaging service that allows users to manage their emails in one application. Postbox has a program that can be downloaded on your computer and with this program, you can manage your emails in one inbox. What makes the Postbox application so unique is its features. The most powerful feature on Postbox’s application is the search feature. The search feature allows the user to effectively search all of his emails from multiple email accounts. The main thing that makes Postbox stand out is that the application is based on the Mozilla platform. The first thing is that Postbox enables users to search all the emails to find documents. Doing this in a conventional manner would be very time consuming and the user would spend more time managing his email than working with it. Furthermore, Postbox also allows the user to even search for images. Images and documents can be accessed very easily through the software’s search tabs. Postbox even enables the user to act on his emails, such as sending them or saving a draft. Postbox even allows users to be able to upload images to online imaging sites without having to download them onto his own personal computer and re-uploading them to the site the user wishes to upload to. Postbox is also independent from different services or account. If a user wishes, he can even access his emails that were sent to his secure work account from any computer anywhere without having to show credentials to a third party.

The software, however does not seem to do what it advertises to do. After downloading it on my machine, the application keeps giving a warning that it fails to connect to my network, despite everything else seems to be working fine on my network. One thing that must be taken note of is that Postbox is still doing beta testing and is not fully in business yet. In any tech startup which still has a program in beta testing, there is always the possibility that there could be problems, which is why beta testing is so important. This allows the company to work out the bugs before taking its final product to market.

The two cofounders of Postbox are Scott MacGreger and Sherman Dickman. Scott MacGreger is the brains behind Postbox and is also the company engineer. Before starting up Postbox, Mr. MacGreger worked as an email application designer for ten years at both Netscape and Mozilla. The last job that Mr. MacGreger held before founding this company was at Mozilla, where he was part of the team that developed Mozilla’s Thunderbird software. Mr. MacGreger began his career designing email and messenger applications for Netscape. Mr. MacGreger graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Masters in Engineering.

Sherman Dickman got together with Mr. MacGreger at Mozilla, where he worked as the company’s Director of Product Management. Before coming to Mozilla, Mr. Dickman worked at Sun Microsystems, where he held key positions in product management and strategic marketing. For seven years at Sun Microsystems, Mr. Dickman mainly worked with the Java Software divisions within the company. Mr. Dickman’s experience with product management also included working for both Broderbund, Inc. and Apple. Mr. Dickman graduated from the University of California in Los Angeles with a degree in English.

Seth Spitzer joined the team at Postbox as the software architect. Like the two cofounders, Mr. Spitzer also came from Mozilla, where he worked as the senior software engineer. One of Mr. Spitzer’s greatest achievements at Mozilla is the creation of Mozilla’s web browser, Firefox. Mr. Spitzer graduated from Stanford University in 1996 with a Masters in Computer Science, and then, Scott MacGreger, went to Netscape, where he worked on email and messenger applications.

In September 9, 2008, Postbox was featured in TechCrunch as planning to compete against both Outlook Express and Mac Mail with their new email browser. The article goes on to feature Postbox’s new product prototype to be “service neutral” and to be able to allow users to access their emails from different accounts anywhere.

On February 9, 2008, Postbox launched its first public beta test of its new email application in San Francisco. According to Sherman Dickman, the way that people use their email today makes all the general email applications obsolete and the main reason that Postbox released their product is to take command of emails, or be the “email command center.”

According to the Apple Blog, Postbox is a new program that can even outweigh the email programs readily available on your Mac today. The article goes on to further state that Postbox’s graphics are stunning and the program is designed to effectively manage your emails and categorize them for easy and quick searches.

Postbox’s investors and the investments that Postbox received from them are not disclosed to the public at this time, however, there are a couple of contributors, who helped fund Postbox. These two contributors are Brian Bell and Brian King.

Brian Bell is based in Bakersfield, California and has had ten years of experience in designing internet oriented software and worked on the Postbox email interface and designed all the icons and pictures seen on the interface itself.

For eleven years, Mr. King has had a track record of developing internet software. Mr. King’s passion is to create the best software that can allow users to get the best experience and ensure the quality of the software. Mr. King is president of Mozdev and he is also a private computer consultant.

Postbox does have a few competitors. One of these is Orgoo, which advertises itself as “your own personal communications cockpit.” Orgoo is a privately owned company, employes 15 people and was founded in November of 2005. Orgoo is based in San Francisco, California and has three people on its management team.

Another competitor is ClearContext, which is based in San Francisco and is a privately owned corporation that was founded in 2003. Clear context has three people on its management team and develops software that helps people work better and more efficiently with email.

For more information about Postbox, click here.

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