A bit more than a year ago, I recommended Mailbox as the best iPhone email app. But while many of my younger colleagues use their phones as their primary email devices, I send nearly all of my emails from my Mac. So I’ve used Mailbox mainly for triage, and less for actual communications.

Last week, Mailbox started rolling out a beta of their OS X desktop app. Like the sadly defunct Sparrow, it’s minimalist in style, and blazingly fast. It also lines up well with how I use email – an emphasis on reaching ‘inbox zero’, and on archiving / searching rather than filing.

Like the mobile app, Mailbox on desktop allows you to ‘snooze’ messages, pushing them out of your inbox to reappear at a time you can actually reply to or act on them. And like the mobile app, Mailbox on desktop badges the total number of messages in your inbox, not just those unread.

I’ve previously found that changing email apps changes my emailing behavior. Using OS X’s built-in Mail.app, for example, causes me to let email backlogs pile up far more than checking the same email directly in Gmail. And, for reasons I’m still not entirely clear on, Mailbox is, in turn, even more effective for me than the Gmail site for staying on top of my inbox.

On the chance it works equally well for you, go check out Mailbox on OS X.

(A final note: as Mailbox is currently rolling out their beta, you’ll need to sign up to receive a ‘betacoin’ to activate the app. I have a handful of betacoins, so ping me if you’d like one.)