Dropbox buys email app startup Mailbox

Online storage firm Dropbox on Friday announced that it has bought Mailbox, a hot startup devoted to making it simpler to deal with email overloads.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

'Like many of you, when we discovered Mailbox we fell in love -- it was simple, delightful, and beautifully engineered,' Dropbox said in a blog posting.

'Many have promised to help us with our overflowing inboxes, but the Mailbox team actually delivered.'

A Mailbox application for organizing and managing Gmail on Apple iPhone or iPod Touch devices became an instant hit after it was made available last month on a first-come, first-served basis to those on a reservation list.

Mailbox has been quickly ramping up service capacity, but the waiting list remains long.

'Rather than grow Mailbox on our own, we've decided to join forces with Dropbox and build it out together,' the Mailbox team said in a blog post.

'To be clear, Mailbox is not going away. The product needs to grow fast, and we believe that joining Dropbox is the best way to make that happen.'

More than 100 million people use San Francisco-based Dropbox to store digital photos, documents, or videos in the Internet 'cloud' with the ability to access online from any computers, according to Mailbox.

'They've got a ton of experience scaling services and are experts at handling people's data with care,' Mailbox said. 'We're all looking forward to making Mailbox even better and getting it into as many people's hands as possible.'