Unibox is a new email client with a simple proposition, one that I find very attractive: organize email by people. After all, one of the most common things that I do in gmail is to search for emails with a specific person, and find which of the several or many email threads has the information I am looking for: an attachment, a link, a phone number, whatever.

So, while Unibox is organized around that context, and in principle I like it, in practice it simply won’t work for me. And probably not for you.

Here’s why. Look at this UX:

You see an interchange I am having with my pal Dave Gray, the founder of Xplane, and now CEO and founder of Limini, and author of The Connected Company. Note that the email thread is shown as a series of chat-like talk balloons. The problem is at the left.

I get a lot of mail for business: press releases, updates to apps, newsletters, and so on. Many many dozens a day. And the new Google filtering in tabs has been a godsend, allowing me to drop the hundreds of filters I had created to organize the stream into something manageable. So, now, when I open my email at 5am on the typical weekday, I get a handful of emails in the Primary tab of Gmail’s new inbox, and almost 100% of the time they belong there.

In the screen above I have everything interjumbled which would lead to a great deal of fooling with emails that just shouldn’t be top of mind, like the mail from Slow Food NYC , the Artisan Shop, and the Little MOO Print Robot (finally bought some new business cards).

The Bottom Line

Unibox is a promising idea, but it unless it starts with something very much like Gmail’s filtering into tabs, it’s not going to satisfy people.

Which opens a different discussion: Could they build a Chrome extension that reorganized my inbox in a people-ordered way? Then I could look at my Primary tab’s contents in a people-oriented fashion. That I’d use in a heartbeat.