For all the technological advances we've made over the past few decades, dealing with email remains a horrible, heinous, please-stop-making-me-do-this experience. But email is far too ingrained in our lives to be disregarded entirely. So we cope.

The latest tool to help us navigate through email hell is Mailbox, an iPhone app that brings a shiny new interface to Gmail accounts that speeds up the email organizing / prioritizing / management process.

It turns out this free little app is actually quite good.

To cut through swaths of unwanted noise, Mailbox takes its inspiration from any to-do app you'd find on a smartphone or computer. Your inbox behaves like a list and every email is treated like a task.

By swiping to the left or the right on any email sitting in your inbox, you can schedule an email to resurface at the top of your list at a later time, check it off and archive it, file it away to a secondary list, or delete it entirely.

When you open an email, those same four actions can be carried out by tapping one of the four icons running across the top of the screen. And like any other good email app, you have the option to reply, forward and star emails.

The scheduling action is especially useful as it allows you to put off something you either can't or don't want to deal with now -- but it doesn't let you forget about it. And if you establish the habit of filing away emails to sub-lists and routinely check them, Mailbox becomes a handy tool for planning things you want to do in the future.

In my case, it helped me stay on top of email announcements for concerts and movies, and I could easily revisit the random assortment of links I receive from friends.

It's a well-executed design. Once you get the hang of it, the vast majority of your email management (replies notwithstanding) can be accomplished with a swipe and a single tap. No other app on the iPhone lets you organize your inbox as quickly and efficiently.

If you use Gmail on other devices, don't worry: Mailbox doesn't actually mess with much in your actual Gmail account. When a scheduled message pops up at the top of your feed in Mailbox, it's really just sitting in a folder when you look it up in Gmail. When you archive a message in Mailbox, it is simply marked as read. The benefits of Mailbox are almost exclusively felt while using the app: It doesn't derail your email if you use another Gmail app.