When the United States Postal Service announced it would no longer deliver mail on Saturdays, those of us with email anxiety had a moment of jealousy. What would it be like to have two whole days when the Internet just didn't deliver to anyone's inbox?

It would be pretty great.

Unfortunately, email is only becoming more of a round-the-clock presence, but a novel new email tool could make it more manageable.

Meet the Mailbox app

Mailbox is a much hyped new app for the iPhone that chips away at overflowing inboxes with simple gesture controls and a brilliant snooze feature. As of Thursday, it is finally available in the Apple App Store after half a year of sneak peeks and raves from beta testers.

I've been using it for my personal email and have become hooked.

Developed by Orchestra, the 2-year-old Palo Alto, California, startup behind the Orchestra to-do app, Mailbox takes the familiar mobile mail app look and adds simple swipe controls for categorizing and prioritizing messages.

"We started this company on this belief that people use email like a terrible to-do list," said Gentry Underwood, founder and CEO of Orchestra.

The app's solution is to quickly get things out of your inbox that aren't urgent so you can better focus on the tasks that are important right now. It does this with four main gestures.

Swipe partially to the right on a message to archive it, all the way to the right to delete it. A long drag all the way to the left can add an email to a list, and a short drag brings up the app's very best feature: Snooze.

Open up your email and look at what's lingering in your inbox. How many are urgent tasks, and how many fall into the gray area of pending, semi-urgent, or indefinitely postponable? Instead of leaving them in your inbox where they add to the noise, Mailbox lets you breezily put them off with one gratifying tap.

The Snooze feature lets you postpone a message for any length of time. Choose later today, this evening, tomorrow, this weekend, next week, in a month, someday (set for three months by default) or a specific date from the grid of icons. You won't need to see or think about those messages again until reminded at the chosen date and time.

Though cleared from the inbox, nothing is really gone. All snoozed messages are organized in the Later tab and archived messages are under the Archive tab.

Reaching for Inbox Zero

There are big issues with the state of modern email. Mostly, there's just too much of it. There are personal messages, work conversations and never-ending group threads on important business decisions -- or where to go for lunch. The majority are emails generated by machines such as mailing lists, travel confirmations, store offers, bank statements and bill reminders.

The inbox is filling too many roles at once, as a catch-all receptacle, to-do list and filing system.

Mailbox is based on one of the more popular methods for dealing with the deluge, Inbox Zero. It's a system for clearing out clutter and handling emails requiring action championed by Merlin Mann, founder of the 43 Folders blog.

"There are a lot of things hanging around there that just can't be dealt with until some other time and yet they stare back at you and nag," said Underwood.

Moving those nagging emails out of the way is a great goal, but many people find constantly fighting the flood in traditional email clients to be more of a time suck than a time saver.

Mailbox's gestures turn the process into an easy and, oddly, fun activity. Once you master the swiping gestures, the clearing process is fast and simple and requires minimal amounts of thought. You don't have to agonize over what folder that email from your boss belongs in, just put it off until tomorrow morning.