Short · checked 29 September 2026
The Russian-built iPhone mail app that turned email into chats.
A chat-style iPhone email client listed from San Francisco in 2014, whose chief executive announced its closure in March 2017 with a public account of what it had raised.
Mailburn's listing, created in November 2014 and captured in March 2015, promised "Email as easy as instant messaging." The iPhone client showed conversations with real people as chats, without "Show quoted text"; a thread that took three screens in the Gmail app, it said, fitted on one. Open tracking was built in. The listing placed the company in San Francisco but aimed the app at salespeople in small and medium Scandinavian companies, with a free basic version and a $10-a-month premium tier for reminders, templates, one-tap replies and CRM integrations.
BetaList had featured the app in October 2014. In a November 2014 post on the Russian startup site spark.ru, the team described sorting the inbox by type: personal mail as chats, newsletters as a feed, and system notifications with their own action buttons. An app-tracker page for the last version, 1.6.1, names the developer as Mailburn Inc. and describes a Reader tab for newsletters with one-swipe unsubscribe.
On 1 March 2017, vc.ru reported that Mailburn's head, Daniil Pavliuchkov, had announced on Facebook that the project was closing after two years. It called Mailburn a Russian-made client, developed with support from the startup studio CoffeeLab and launched in February 2015. Pavliuchkov said investment had been hard to raise: Mailburn raised less than $150,000, and a signed $250,000 deal fell through when the investors never sent the money. He put downloads at 20,000, said 80 percent of users were outside Russia and the CIS, and invited offers for the project or its parts: the code, the design and the US legal entity.
The app's App Store page now returns not found, and the mailburn.com domain is offered for sale at $10,595.