Frequently Asked Questions

Electron gets a bad reputation, and some of it is deserved. But the framework itself isn't the problem — lazy engineering is. VS Code, Slack, Discord, Figma, and Notion are all built on Electron, and millions of people use them daily without complaint. The difference is in how you build on top of it.

Box is performance-engineered from the ground up. Virtualized message lists mean only the visible rows are rendered, no matter how large your mailbox is. Aggressive caching keeps repeated views instant. A dual IMAP connection strategy handles sync and user-initiated operations in parallel without blocking. And because there's zero telemetry, there's zero telemetry overhead — no background analytics, no tracking payloads, no wasted cycles phoning home.

The result is a desktop email client that idles at around 250MB of RAM and launches fast. That's not an accident — it's the result of careful architecture decisions and constant profiling.

We didn't choose Electron and hope for the best. We chose it and then did the work.

Because sustainability matters more than ideology. Open source is wonderful, and Box depends on a huge number of open-source projects. But building and maintaining a polished desktop email client takes sustained effort, and that effort needs to be funded.

Box offers a generous free tier — one account, full functionality, no time limit. If you need multiple accounts, the license is $10 once, not a subscription. That one-time purchase funds continued development, bug fixes, and new features.

We have deep respect for the open-source ecosystem and contribute back where we can. But we believe the best way to keep Box alive and improving is to build a product good enough that people are happy to pay for it.

You don't have to. Box is free for one email account with full functionality — no trial, no feature restrictions, no expiration. If one account is all you need, you never pay a cent.

If you need multiple accounts, the license is $10. Once. That's it. No subscription, no renewal, no upsell.

Thunderbird is a solid project with decades of history. Box is something different — a modern email client built from the ground up with a focus on privacy, performance, and a clean user experience. It's actively developed by someone who uses it every day and cares about getting the details right.

Download the free version and judge for yourself.

Box has no cloud dependency. Your email is stored locally in SQLite. Your credentials are in your OS keyring. Box connects directly to your mail servers and nothing else. There is no Box server sitting between you and your email.

There's no subscription to lapse. There's no remote kill switch. If the licensing server disappeared tomorrow, your existing license would continue to work because verification happens locally using a cryptographic signature — not a server ping.

Even in a worst-case scenario where development stops entirely, Box would continue to function as a fully capable email client for as long as your mail servers support standard IMAP and SMTP.

That's not a promise — it's how the architecture works.

Any modern Linux distribution. Box is distributed as an AppImage, which runs on virtually every Linux distro without installation — just download, make it executable, and run. This includes Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Arch, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Manjaro, openSUSE, and many others.

A .deb package is also available for Debian-based distributions if you prefer a traditional install with desktop integration.

If you run into issues on your specific distro, reach out to us and we'll do our best to help.

Because there's no telemetry code in Box. No analytics SDK. No tracking pixels. No usage reporting. No crash reporting that phones home. This isn't a policy decision that could be reversed with a config change — it's an architectural guarantee. The code to collect and transmit telemetry simply doesn't exist.

You don't have to take our word for it. Run ss, netstat, or Wireshark while Box is running. You'll see connections to your mail servers and nothing else. During license activation, you'll see a single request to the licensing service — and that's it.

Read the full details in our Privacy Architecture.

When you activate a license, Box sends your license key and a machine identifier to the licensing service. The service validates the key, generates a signed token, and returns it. Box stores that token in your OS keyring and verifies it locally using the embedded public key.

That's the entire interaction. No email content. No credentials. No IP address logging. No usage data. No periodic check-ins. The licensing service knows that a valid license key was activated on a machine — nothing more.

For the full technical breakdown, see our Licensing Transparency page.

Yes. After the initial account setup and sync, Box works fully offline. All your email data is stored in a local SQLite database, so you can read, search, and browse your messages without a network connection.

If you compose or reply to an email while offline, it goes into the outbox and sends automatically when connectivity returns. Folder operations and flag changes are queued in a deferred sync system that retries gracefully when your connection is restored.

Licensing also works offline. Once activated, your license token is verified locally using a cryptographic signature — no server check required.