Dropbox’s acquisition of Mailbox for $100 million has fueled more interest and development in mobile applications aimed at helping users triage their way through overcrowded inboxes. The latest idea in the making is SquareOne, an email app arriving now in beta, which will allow users to designate which emails are important and worth their time. But it does this in a different way than typical “priority inbox” scenarios do today.

That is, instead of lumping emails into two broad buckets – priority and everything else (like Gmail’s priority inbox setting does, for those who avoid Gmail’s new tabbed experience) – SquareOne wants to help users configure several different buckets, like “friends,” “work,” “VIP,” “Digests,” or any other category of emails you see fit to add.

According the company’s young founder and CEO Branko Cerny, a recent Dartmouth grad and, briefly, a Google employee, he came up with the idea for SquareOne while in school, as he became overrun with emails while working as the publisher at the student newspaper, The Dartmouth.

“I started thinking, I wish there was an email client that I could tell [that] I’m busy studying right now, and the only thing I care about is the stuff related to the newspaper, or just stuff from the editorial board, and nothing else,” Cerny says. He started imagining how something like that would work, and this eventually became what is now SquareOne.

Cerny founded the company this August along with [Dartmouth engineering major] James Mock and designer Sang Lee. Among its first hires, are Weidong Shao, who spent five years working on the Gmail/Google Apps team, and iOS engineer Arthur Conner.