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Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
- ucaetano 11y agoIs this a sign the Dropbox's diversification strategy into a full collaboration product failed? In other words, Dropbox can't move away from being a feature?
- mtgx 11y agoYes.
- johnchristopher 11y agoThen Paper is likely going to be next.
- emitstop 11y agoNot surprised at all, there hasn't been any updates or improvements in awhile, especially for the desktop app, it's nearly unuseable with its current bugs. Seemed like Dropbox never put enough resources into it for it to really get off the ground. I've switched to airmail for the time being, but I'm definitely going to miss snoozing emails to specific dates.
- Killah911 11y agoMailbox helped me get control of an otherwise unmanageable email problem. Brad Feld recently recommended outlook. Which is funny because an old version of outlook was the thing that created my email monster & subsequent search for a better email client.
- scotchio 11y agoCool products coming and going doesn't really even surprise me anymore. I've become a little jaded to the whole come and go of all the different tools and apps. Anyway, if you guys haven't checked out Boxer [1] for email, it's the best. I went a little obsessive, tested every email client on iOS, and this one was without a doubt is my favorite: * Push notifications * Doesn't hijack labels with archive/to-do/completed nonsense * Universal inbox * Nice labeling/archiving/customizing via swiping * Beautiful interface I love it and highly recommend [1] http://www.getboxer.com/ http://www.getboxer.com/
- desireco42 11y agoThank you for recommendation, I don't believe I heard about it before you mentioned it.
- scotchio 11y agoNo problem. I honestly liked it better than MailBox - and the built in iOS email client (for obvious reasons), Outlook, Sunrise, GMail, etc.
- desireco42 11y agoCheck this out http://www.getboxer.com/boxer-joins-vmware/ http://www.getboxer.com/boxer-joins-vmware/ how likely is that they will shutter it down, rebrand it in a way that we/me will not like it.
- nullrouted 11y agoIt will be brought into Airwatch and used exclusively for that.
- nikolay 11y agoSo stupid, really! Carousel is the only Dropbox product I use and it works really great!
- jwcooper 11y agoThey're killing the apps I actually use from them. Carousel was quite useful for all of the photos I've uploaded, and handles uploading the photos pretty well too. This is finally giving me the opportunity to explore using some of the other cloud storage such as Google Drive or even iCloud where I can save some money each month as well.
- nikolay 11y agoYes. They are shooting themselves into the feet. Too bad I pay annually! They won't be able to realize I left them until next year! I even got one extra year from Dell's Black Friday. Urgh!
- SingAlong 11y agoI was just thinking the same. Uninstalled it after reading the news. The "free up phone space" feature was too good on my phone (old and limited space)
- StrLght 11y agoIf you want to migrate somewhere else - Google Photos for Android was updated recently with this feature and it was announced for iOS to come soon.
- nikolay 11y agoYeah, it will be lame if they decided to kill it just because Google Photos added a feature.
- danieldk 11y agoWell, if you are worried about cancelled apps and platforms, Google Photos is probably not a good bet. They went from Picasa to Google+ Photos to Google Photos. In every transition, features were lost that people relied on...
- schneidmaster 11y agoUgh. Yet another intriguing email startup being acquihired and killed off by a more-established tech company (see also: Sparrow). It's 2015 and I still bounce around email clients every couple months because all of the major options have substantial flaws.
- cm2012 11y agoWhat do you not like about Outlook or Gmail (I think the market leaders)?
- zyxley 11y agoThe "delay for later" feature is tremendously useful compared to traditional inbox handling. Of course, to trust that feature, it also has to be tremendously reliable, and that's the biggest thing that Mailbox got right in the first place. That's also why it very handily beat out Mail Pilot, which had the same idea and got started earlier but to this day is still filled with terrible bugs.
- zimpenfish 11y agoThey don't work with other people's IMAP/POP3 servers? (Well, the Gmail iOS app certainly doesn't; I haven't tried the Outlook client but the description in the app store suggests a very limited set of providers.)
- msh 11y agoGmail for Android supports third party pop\imap servers quite well.
- cbhl 11y agoThe GMail Android app does work with other people's IMAP and POP3 servers, for what it's worth. But then you have to use Android. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6078445?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6078445?hl=en
- cwyers 11y ago
- reverend_gonzo 11y agoThat is unfortunate. Mailbox was, and still is, (barring a few bugs) one of the better, Zero-inbox mail apps for IOS. Spark by Readdle has taken up slack there, and they look like they're building it in a way that will actually be monetizable.
- aeorgnoieang 11y agoBut can I sort my unread emails by ascending date? If I'm practicing inbox-zero, I don't want to fight my email client to review my oldest (unread) emails first.
- reverend_gonzo 11y agoIt seems to sort with the newest at the top. The app is free so try it out. It took a little getting used to after having used Mailbox for so long, but it unquestionably better.
- zyxley 11y ago> Spark Do you know if they're going to do a desktop version too? (Or, to be more pessimistic: "How long until that gets acquihired and killed off too?")
- reverend_gonzo 11y agoI don't know about desktop. I just use my phone/ipad for 90% of my email, so that works fine by me. As for being hired, Readdle makes a ton of ios apps, and are profitable in their own right. Also, while Spark is free, some of the features they've hinted to as coming in the future will likely be in-app purchases / upgrades, that will allow it to be profitable as well.
- eevilspock 11y agoDesktop version slated for early 2016. https://twitter.com/sparkmailapp/status/673945229221896192 https://twitter.com/sparkmailapp/status/673945229221896192 They've shown screenshots of the Mac app in dev.
- TheBiv 11y agoHere is more detail about Dropbox Paper: http://www.engadget.com/2015/10/15/dropbox-paper-team-collaboration-tools/ http://www.engadget.com/2015/10/15/dropbox-paper-team-collab...
- nikolay 11y agoThey will focus on Paper... until they decide to axe that, too , when they see they can't compete with Google. I think the axe-happy mentality sends the wrong signals when considering products. I'm not gonna use Paper, really, I'm gonna phase off Dropbox as well. I'm not happy they killed Carousel. It was a small simple product - maybe they need a couple of developers to keep it going. It doesn't have to be fancy. I just worked and worked well.
- menacingly 11y agoYeah, I completely agree. Carousel is one of my favorite apps because of how unobtrusive and simple it is. It makes me feel like they're not going to commit to anything of theirs if I use it. Fortunately, the nature of the service makes it trivial to migrate away.
- danieldk 11y agoThey will focus on Paper... until they decide to axe that, too , when they see they can't compete with Google. And that will be even worse... Carousel used photos that were stored in Dropbox. Mailbox used an existing mailbox. As far as I could see Paper data is just locked up in their cloud and can only be exported as PDF. No thanks. All these acquisitions and axed products have made one thing clear to me: I want plain-old files that I can download. Preferably in some open standard.
- gcr 11y ago> It was a small simple product. Dropbox itself is just a folder that syncs. Small and simple, right? Carousel is just a camera roll that syncs. Small and simple, right? There is an amazing amount of engineering and planning that goes into both products though.
- orliesaurus 11y agoWow - feels bad for those folks that got acqui-hired and now see their product being "laid off" RIP Mailbox, you were cool to play with for a few hours that one stormy day I decided to install you
- minimaxir 11y agoMailbox/Orchestra was not an acquihire for pennies; it was a normal acquisition for $100 million: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/mailbox-cost-dropbox-around-100-million/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/mailbox-cost-dropbox-around...
- georgespencer 11y agoMainly stock. They acquired the engineers for a tiny fraction of Dropbox's valuation. (Today: $10bn.)
- austenallred 11y agoYeah, they're retired now
- sirkneeland 11y agoI feel more badly for the people who used and loved the products. Hard to feel bad for people who got a nice pile of money and a cushy job and probably more equity that can turn into another pile of money later...
- 27182818284 11y agoI've been a Dropbox user for--I don't know how long. A long time. I would say since...maybe 2009? I do not know what those products are for sure. By their names I'm guessing something with photos and something with email. I feel like an old evangelist like myself would have known more about those products. Thus, I wonder if this was a marketing failure as much as a product-market-fit failure.
- chungy 11y agoLikewise, I've had Dropbox since around 2009 or 2010, never even heard of Mailbox until now. I actively avoided Carousel solely because of how much the mobile Dropbox app was trying to push it on me, my reaction was more-or-less "What? I'm not changing my workflow." and ignored it. Might have been a shame, but it didn't feel welcoming with how they tried to do that...
- Eric_WVGG 11y agoA while back Dropbox said that they had grander ambitions that being a single-product (Dropbox the service) company, rather they wanted to be a sort of Microsoft, Lotus or Borland of the current generation. This statement preceded the acquisition of Carousel (a sort of alternative to iPhoto and Picasa built on Dropbox [the service]) Mailbox (an alternative email client, no technical connection to Dropbox [the service]). So yeah maybe this strategy isn’t panning out? I dunno, just irritated that the default move for abandonware isn’t open-sourcing it.
- xrjn 11y agoWhat are the chances that these go down the path of HackPad and be turned into open source projects? I think it's a win-win situation if companies, such as Google and now Dropbox: let go of the responsibility of maintaining it and allow the project to live on in the hands of the community.
- calgoo 11y agohttps://www.mailboxapp.com/faq/ https://www.mailboxapp.com/faq/ Will Mailbox be open-sourced? Unfortunately not. We gave a lot of thought to open-sourcing the underlying system, but this is ultimately not something we will support.
- s73v3r 11y agoThat would be just as bad, considering no one's really touched HackPad in the intervening time.
- mark_l_watson 11y agoGood idea. I was bummed out when Google Wave was cancelled, then happy when I found out how easy it was to run the derivative Apache Wave on my own server, then bummed again when friends and family did not want to use my Apache Wave instance because of the limited network effect (i.e, not enough people were using it).
- Killah911 11y agoThat sucks, I really like Mailbox. I guess outlook it is on iOS.
- sgarrity 11y agoI haven't used Mailbox, but I'm glad to see Carousel being rolled back into the main Dropbox app. It's already good for photos, and didn't warrant a separate app.
- colmvp 11y agoMailbox and Sunrise, two productivity apps that I liked, got acquired (Dropbox 2013, Microsoft 2015), and discontinued in 2015.
- benjarrell 11y agoI'm still using Sunrise to this day, is there an announcement about it being discontinued?
- rodgerd 11y agoApparently so: http://appadvice.com/appnn/2015/10/microsoft-announces-plans-to-discontinue-the-popular-sunrise-calendar-app http://appadvice.com/appnn/2015/10/microsoft-announces-plans... (Unwelcome) news to me.
- torbit 11y agoso Sunrise gets sunset :)
- blairbeckwith 11y agoI had to look for this too: http://blog.sunrise.am http://blog.sunrise.am
- nikolay 11y agoStartups beware: If you care about your products, not just about the exit, don't let yourself get acquired by Dropbox!
- RyJones 11y agoI think you can almost stop that at the word acquired. I loved pre-acquisition FolderShare. After Microsoft bought them, FolderShare was mashed into a bunch of aborted projects that sucked.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoUsers beware: just ignore startups altogether. A hot startup is a vehicle for converting user growth into money for the founders and investors. It does not exist to create and maintain a good product. It's fine to tag along for a ride; it's not good to make yourself dependent on its continued existence.
- smnrchrds 11y agoAnother one bites the dust... I still remember the discussion when the acquisition was announced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5381572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5381572 I hope it was really not going anywhere.
- timdiggerm 11y ago>Did you not RTFA? >> " To be clear, Mailbox is not going away. When people say stuff like this when a startup gets acquired, don't believe them.
- rdancer 11y agoIf you put a few in the back of someone's head, technically they're not going anywhere either.
- jonknee 11y agoI would have guessed Mailbox could have been sold instead of shuttered. Maybe MAU has slid lately, but I thought they had a lot of happy users. On the other hand, it's amusing to note the Valley inflation that has happened since Mailbox was acquired in early 2013. It was for ~$100M which seems like chump change in the Age of The Unicorn that we now find ourselves in.
- orrinward 11y agoI'm now getting nervous about Hackpad. Been using it for years and love it to bits. Another Dropbox acquihire...
- bengotow 11y agoI'm afraid Hackpad is also dead—Dropbox open sourced it, and no one has touched it since October: https://github.com/dropbox/hackpad https://github.com/dropbox/hackpad
- nathan_f77 11y agoI only recently switched to Mailbox because I got tired of an annoying UI bug in Sparrow that was never going to be fixed. I was just starting to get used to Mailbox. What mail app should I be using now?
- LeeUmm 11y agoI switched back to Airmail on OS X last week as it was pretty obvious Mailbox was dead as there were 2 critical bugs regarding switch and images not loading that hadn't been fixed in months. It's a shame but that's life. I have to manually setup the rules/filters for now but reading through some other clients in the app store they seem to be buggy. I used Airmail years ago before Mailbox and it was stable and has been since switching back.
- dntrkv 11y agoI went from Sparrow to Mailbox to Airmail. Sparrow was the best for its time. Mailbox had potential but was riddled with bugs. Airmail doesn't have the cleanest interface nor all the coolest features, but it's the best option I've found at the moment. For iOS I am still using Mailbox, but I guess now I have to use something else, will probably give the Gmail client a go. One OSX client I've just found that I'm hoping does what I need: https://nylas.com/N1 https://nylas.com/N1 It's open source.
- teaneedz 11y agoThe AirMail UI needs work but I use it for its support of Markdown - one of the areas that really needs polishing.
- reverend_gonzo 11y agoCheck out Spark by Readdle. It replaces Mailbox fairly well.
- ents 11y agoSpark and Outlook seem to be the most delightful to use.
- calgoo 11y agoI wish they could open source Mailbox at least... That way it might survive. [1] "Will Mailbox be open-sourced? Unfortunately not. We gave a lot of thought to open-sourcing the underlying system, but this is ultimately not something we will support." [1] https://www.mailboxapp.com/faq/ https://www.mailboxapp.com/faq/
- adrianmacneil 11y agoI imagine Mailbox has a heavy server component, which would be non-trivial to get set up and running on your own.
- grinich 11y agoIf you're looking for an alternative, we built one at Nylas. :) https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine
- eliotfowler 11y agoNylas looks awesome. Has anyone built a plugin for it that allows for "message snoozing"? That was the real ingenuity with Mailbox IMO.
- spang 11y agoNot yet! Totally something that we'd love to see, though.
- slang800 11y agoThat's hardly a reason to not open-source. You're not required to provide support just because you release your source code. Even a dump of their repositories would be useful for people who are interested in Mailbox.
- exelius 11y agoNo; but often the server components are heavily tied to some other proprietary libraries that they're not ready to open source. They could remove all proprietary code from their codebase, but that costs money - likely more than they were willing to spend on this product. Unless open source is part of your marketing strategy (which means the effort would have a budget), it's really difficult to open source an existing commercial application.
- ents 11y agoSuch a shame. Only snoozing system that works for iOS and Mac without injecting additional emails into the thread to return them to the inbox. Ugh.
- avitzurel 11y agoThis is very sad news and I don't really get the decision. The thing with Mailbox is that it was truly a great product before it switched hands to Dropbox. Once they bought it, that was the end of good functions and the product only went downhill from there. There's a lot of potential with email clients that will help you work better, Mailbox was definitely one of those products that helped. With good clients for Mac and PC along with smartphones it would also be profitable IMHO. The only thing I can think of is that Dropbox is headed for major firing rounds and they want to save up on resources. I have switched to Airmail on my Mac and I am much happier now.
- austenallred 11y agoI'm still hoping they'll sell them to someone. Dropbox is obviously planning to go a different direction with its core product strategy, so that makes sense to me, but those products were too good to just let die. I'm sure someone would be willing to take them off of Dropbox's hands.
- avitzurel 11y agoThat would be the rational thing to do. I don't believe it will happen though. If it was going to happen it would before they announced they're shutting it down. I just don't get how you can spend 100m$ on something and just let it die. What did Dropbox get out of this deal? SV is depressing sometimes.
- nimrod0 11y agoThey got the brains and patents (if applicable).
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- skuhn 11y agoSo you're saying that Mailbox was a great product for the whole month between when it launched and Dropbox acquired it? I can tell you that behind the scenes it was far from a well architected service, and the only reason why it was able to ditch the signup waitlist and ultimately handle the needs of its userbase was entirely due to the Dropbox acquisition.
- pkamb 11y agoI thought Carousel looked really cool, eagerly installed it on release. Then I discovered that when Carousel is installed, the Dropbox app stops automatically uploading photos from your phone. You have to now open Carousel to do so. Broke my existing upload process, and due to iOS permissions for the new app or not launching it frequently or something the new Carousel upload process wasn't reliable. Discovered this by noticing that weeks of pictures weren't backed up to Dropbox. Glad I didn't lose my phone. Ended up just deleting the Carousel app rather than figuring it out. The Dropbox app started syncing reliably again.
- STRiDEX 11y agoSounds like you had a bad experience. I enjoyed the app until recently switching to amazon primes unlimited photo uploads. The amazon photo app has a very similar feature set compared to Carousel, but seemingly worse performance on large collections.
- itslennysfault 11y agoI had the same experience. I really liked Carousel. It was a great way to organize my photos, but like you said it totally disables auto-sync.
- gcr 11y agoOn iOS at least, apps can't run in the background. Carousel could only upload photos when you open it (or, as a workaround, when your GPS location changes if you've given that permission). Carousel's "Flashback -- Discover This Day in the Past Year" feature strikes me as a very clever social workaround since it gets you to open the app at least once a week. The Dropbox iOS app has the same limitation. Presumably you opened it more to do unrelated tasks, so it makes a lot of sense to bundle them. Google Photos has the same limitation as well on iOS. I find Carousel's syncing and Google Photos' syncing seem to be roughly on par with each other.
- dclowd9901 11y agoStepping off the pity train, what out there is a good replacement for Mailbox?
- slang800 11y agoYou can look at https://github.com/nylas/n1 https://github.com/nylas/n1 (also mentioned elsewhere in this thread)
- skhatri11 11y agoI loved Mailbox. Really disappointing. What do folks suggest we use as our replacement email app? Problem with Apple's stock Mail app is that Google doesn't allow push email. Yes, those few seconds before I receive an email are very precious to me :)
- DomBlack 11y agoI've been looking to move to FastMail for a while, but Mailbox was holding me back (the whole zero-inbox with the remind me this weekend stuff). Does anybody know of a good zero-inbox client for FastMail?
- mark_l_watson 11y agoIf you want a zero inbox client, then InBox on top of gmail is pretty good. I use FastMail as my primary email, and I don't quite do zero inbox. I probably have on average 5 to 8 emails in my inbox, and a few stick around for days. It takes some effort and overhead but I am trying to move away from email as being a "memory box" for organizing my life. Instead I am using subject organized markdown files stored in encrypted cloud storage where I maintain tasks, research notes, etc. since these are synced on my laptops, I can search them with spotlight, cortana, etc. Combined with FastMail, this scheme keeps me organized. As easy as using InBox for email and TODOs? No, but so far it is working for me.
- eevilspock 11y agoSpark is great for this; it supports IMAP very well. You can customize the UI for archive, trash, snooze and pin swipes to your liking. And unlike Mailbox, does not rely on server side access to your email or email account.
- argonaut 11y agoFWIW, a friend told me Mailbox was dead (the team had been moved off the product) back in June, so this was internally known for months.
- minimaxir 11y agoRelevant Twitter discussion: https://twitter.com/mikeisaac/status/673918795707244544 https://twitter.com/mikeisaac/status/673918795707244544
- flyrain 11y agoThat's really bad news for me. I've used Mailbox everyday for a long time, before it joined Dropbox. I am really happy with it, and never tried to switch to another mail client.
- vessenes 11y agoOoh, this is very sad. I rely heavily on Mailbox and its follow-up functionality. Any advice for ios-capable replacements out there? EDIT: The FAQ recommends Google Inbox, Apple Mail and Outlook. I just looked at Inbox again after quite a while away, and it seems like it may be feature-complete with Mailbox.
- squiguy7 11y agoMaybe Inbox from Google? That's all I can think of at the moment. I am as sad as you are. I felt like I had absolute control over my email with no messages in the inbox and being able to snooze messages to check later.
- btmills 11y agoSnooze functionality became my most important feature after using Mailbox. I switched to Outlook several months ago because it supports snoozing and archiving with the same swipe gestures, and it allows me to add all of the mail accounts Mailbox didn't support. The UX isn't quite as polished as Mailbox's, but that's improving regularly.
- zwily 11y agoI was a die-hard Sparrow user when that was killed. I've been using Inbox now since it came out, and it mostly fits the bill. I wish there was a desktop app like Sparrow, but the browser UI is decent. I still have to open gmail occasionally to make filters, but that's all.
- kad3nce 11y agoI've been using Spark from Readdle for a while. It has customizeable swipe actions, so I was able to make it mimic Mailbox quite well. Has some other cool features too.
- joshcrowder 11y agoFrustrating as its still my favourite mail app. Although development has definitely slowed down (for desktop at least) over the past 6 months.
- mkhalil 11y agoThis is the reason why I stick to the native mail on iOS or Gmail app for the emails i need instantly without fetch. Yeah they may have their cons, but I don't have to worry about Apple dropping Mail app. Mail should be simple, I think the best apps are the lightweight ones that don't require too much work to keep alive, and definitely don't require a backend server process. Also, Mailbox had access to all your mail, and when Dropbox bought it while having M̶r̶s̶Miss.Rice on the board of directors, well...that just felt yucky. My simple solution to keeping my mail under control: ONE filter on the Gmail side of things, called "Good Spam". Any reoccurring email I like, but don't want to keep manually archiving everyday, SKIPS inbox and goes into that folder. The filter is literally a huge list of email addresses from senders. (ex snippet "....events@eventful.com mail@e.groupon.com radioshack@em.radioshack.com Hewlett-Packard@us.newsgram.hp.com....") Anytime I get an email I don't consider "Good Spam" I unsubscribe from. Then on my phone, I just get important or new mail. BONUS from using filter instead of unsubscribing: When you are in that store and you need that BANANA REPUBLIC coupon at the register, you still have access to it. Open email app, search for it, and use it. And you don't need to keep looking at their emails everyday just to archive it. Or in case of Mailbox, swiping right....thumbs get tired too.
- keehun 11y agoWhat I've started doing is to filter via whether or not they're in my contacts. I have a folder (I don't use Gmail) where all non-contact-originating email goes into. That folder doesn't even ring up the new email count. I've immensely enjoyed this new system. I, like you, immediately unsubscribe from things that I don't even care about in the "good-spam" box. Only I am too lazy (or don't care enough) to maintain a huge list of email addresses to filter out. I'd rather err on the side of too much filtering (e.g. not in my contacts) since I still get it on my phone/desktop. If I ever want something to hit me right away, I just add it to my contacts, even if it's a company/"good-spam" address.
- mkhalil 11y agoNice. White list approach as oppose to black list. Makes sense. I would probably end up still using a filter though, because I don't want to have so many contacts for people I barely contact.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rifung 11y agoCan anyone explain to me, someone who's more than happy with GMail, what these apps offer that aren't being offered by Google/Microsoft? It seems like Mailbox had a loyal following but I guess my email use is just not sophisticated enough to understand.
- omaranto 11y agoI didn't use Mailbox, but I think one of the key features is the snooze button, that makes an email disappear from your inbox and then reappear later. I think at the time Mailbox came out Google didn't offer that feature. The GMail webapp still doesn't have it but now Google Inbox does.
- whorleater 11y agoOutlook has it now too, which is surprising.
- damontal 11y agoI use Outlook. The thing I like about it is that it integrates my gmail and icloud accounts nicely. Native iOS app doesn't work well with GMail because you won't get notifications for new mail. And the GMail app doesn't work well with my icloud.com email - or iCloud doesn't forward to GMail reliably. So I use the MS Outlook app and both are integrated seamlessly.
- smackfu 11y agoIt's related to a productivity strategy called "inbox zero" where you immediately deal with every email in your inbox when you check your mail. "Deal with" might be to delete it if it's junk, respond immediately if you can, or defer it to later. A lot of these clients are aimed at making this process as fast and efficient as possible. So taking actions on an email are often just a swipe, and there are facilities to defer an email to a particular time, or adding it to a to-do list. It's mainly intended at people who get too much email.
- aldanor 11y ago
- rangibaby 11y agoThat's abrupt. It wasn't that long ago I was bribed into downloading Mailbox by some notification in the Dropbox app. Bummer too, because I really like it. They're not even going to leave it and let it slowly decay until time takes it's toll and nature wins like with Sparrow. "As you evaluate alternatives, you might consider the stock apps like iOS Mail (Apple) and Gmail (Android)" I guess they didn't have much time to research other mail clients.
- Shank 11y agoInbox is a very close alternative, and that's even by Google. They didn't think that through at all.
- huac 11y agoI ctrl-F'd "Android" - Mailbox is the best email app for Android other than Inbox - which doesn't work with my school's Google Apps configuration. Shame that there are no other good Android apps, but iOS has a few.
- aashaykumar92 11y agoSad, Drew had said it's not going anywhere when the acquisition was announced. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5381572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5381572
- timdorr 11y agoTo be fair, that was 3 years ago. A lot can change in that amount of time.
- jacquesm 11y agoYes, they could do a spin-out.
- jacquesm 11y agoExecutive promises at the time of an acquisition mean absolutely nothing, their main goal is to reduce break-off risk (both of users and employees) due to change of control.
- staunch 11y agoIt's far more likely that he was overly optimistic about Mailbox's chances of success at Dropbox. Founders are notoriously delusional about this kind of thing. Dropbox wasn't worried about maintaining the small existing Mailbox userbase, they were betting they could grow it by millions of users. When it didn't work, it messed up their plans (and promises). Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
- tomc1985 11y agoIt used to be when the company went out of business, their software still worked...
- TeMPOraL 11y agoNow the trend is to export the cloud-dependent, you-buy-only-license model to the physical world. Welcome to the future.
- Polarity 11y agoDon't use anything that's not open source. Period.
- dordoka 11y agoThey have opened a community thread in their forums. [0] [0] https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/203840413-Saying-Goodbye https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/203840...
- ColinWright 11y agoSignificant amount of discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10690716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10690716
- dutchbrit 11y agoTime to make an open-source replacement?
- orliesaurus 11y agoor just open source this?
- ptio 11y agoWill Mailbox be open-sourced? [1] Unfortunately not. We gave a lot of thought to open-sourcing the underlying system, but this is ultimately not something we will support. [1] http://www.mailboxapp.com/faq/ http://www.mailboxapp.com/faq/
- benburton 11y agoGood to hear it's finally official. The Mac desktop app has been unusable for the past 6 months.
- tvararu 11y agoI felt this coming given my experience using the Mailbox desktop app since it launched: - Good experience, fairly regular releases, stability increasing with each one. - Stagnation in releases, but app is in a fairly good working state. - Out of the blue, big update comes in, application changes completely. For the worse, as it loses a bunch of features and is sporting a far less polished look and finish. I believe the new version is now an OS X native application as opposed to a webview. - Frantic releases over the following weeks, killing some bugs but introducing more. - Stagnation in releases, in its fairly broken state. - This announcement. From the outside, it looks like a case of an engineering team that decided it would rewrite the application from scratch in the native stack. Widely regarded as a bad idea. [1] After numerous months spent burning money in refactoring and rebuilding features that already existed and worked, management pressure builds up, and they decide to release their "good enough" native version. After torturous weeks of back to back frantic releases to fix all of the complaints coming in, some factor or another (developer churn possibly) caused them to cease development and decide to sack the project altogether. This is of course just speculation, a narrative I made up. That's how it looks like from the outside to me, but I'd like to hear from the developers inside, since I know they must be reading this thread. I loved this application and I'm saddened to have to move away from it. [1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RewriteCodeFromScratch http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RewriteCodeFromScratch
- azinman2 11y agoI just don't think they had the numbers on Carousel, and maybe not enough growth in Mailbox either. If they were getting users like mad, of course Dropbox would focus its attention on expanding them.
- tim333 11y ago>I just don't think they had the numbers on Carousel My friends experience matched what they said on their blog that people just want their photos in their Dropbox
- HeavenFox 11y agoI worked on the desktop client for several months up until the first public beta release. No, Mailbox for Mac has been a fully native app since inception - which is how you get those nice fluid gestures. What happened next I have no idea, since I left the company. If I have to guess, we incurred a lot of technical debts during the sprint to beta, and they were doing some major rewriting to fix them. Before it was finished, the project was axed. The new version was released nonetheless to support sunsetting.
- SneakerXZ 11y agoIt is no surprise, when one-product companies do other products they don't last for long. Only reason why I still use Dropbox is their client for Mac and and simple web interface and some other small features. I don't understand why nobody else is able to do it...
- danieldk 11y agoI don't understand why nobody else is able to do it... Because they don't care, need to, or want to? Google and Microsoft are competing with Dropbox on economics of scale and perhaps as a loss-leader. A lot of people are willing to forgo peer to peer LAN sync or block-level syncing when the cost is much lower. Additionally, both Google Drive and OneDrive have an integrated office suite, which adds value for a lot of people. Moreover, if you can get away with a weak client, it's an advantage. Someone who has all their data synced to disk can easily switch. Someone who has their data primarily in someone's cloud cannot as easily.
- rdancer 11y agoNetwork file systems are hard. There are 30+ years of posts in various places of the Internet, hundreds of books, and dozens of implementations' source listings that you can read. Dropbox have exceptional engineering talent, and a mature code base. Nobody else before or since, has ever come even close to what they have, quality- or feature-wise. That they make it look easy doesn't mean that it is easy. It's like saying, all this guy ever does is hitting the puck in the net skating backwards, I don't understand why nobody else is able to do it?
- tedmiston 11y ago> We’ve come to believe that the best way for us to improve people’s productivity going forward is to streamline the workflows that generate so much email in the first place. AKA Paper --> https://paper.dropbox.com https://paper.dropbox.com I don't know if I understand what Dropbox is anymore. It's gone from: syncing file storage --> a decentralized app ecosystem that in some ways competes with PaaS (effectively an OS [1]) --> document and media collaboration tools. They might be one of the only companies whose products compete with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon... Just to clarify, I think they've done all of these things well. 1: http://scripting.com/liveblog/users/davewiner/2015/12/07/0593.html http://scripting.com/liveblog/users/davewiner/2015/12/07/059...
- tammer 11y agoPerhaps I'm wearing rose-colored glasses as a non-gmailer, but I think in the end everyone is served better by more difficult types of innovation. I look forward to seeing what Paper turns out to be.
- chollida1 11y agoIs this Dropbox cleaning up their balance sheet in an attempt to IPO? There's a pretty loud rumor floating around, heck it was reported on CNBC today, that Dropbox can't come close to IPOing anywhere near its $10 Billion dollar valuation. Though Fidelity did mark them up slightly at the end of November! And for better or worse, they are going to be closely compared to Box, which has been a pretty big disaster since IPOing. For the record, BOX is valued at 1.65 Billion currently. And it has an awful lot of short interest current( a measure of the ratio of shares sold short vs the total outstanding shares).
- gcr 11y agoOn the other hand, I thought Dropbox was squashing Box like a bug in terms of users. Not sure if that translates to revenue though. Wouldn't investors want the most profitable company to IPO?
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- wpietri 11y agoFor fans of the genre, I strongly recommend Our Incredible Journey: http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
- univalent 11y agoThis stinks. I was just getting used to Mailbox. Why buy these smaller companies unless you have a long term plan on how its going to be NPV +ve?
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- thejerz 11y agoCan someone in the HN community please just remake Sparrow? I'll give you my money right now.
- hcurtiss 11y agoI don't know much about Mailbox, but I was an enthusiastic Carousel user . . . until Google released Photos. With Google Drive integration (both up and down), way better search, easy sharing (without requiring a recipient Google account), and photo editing, I dropped Carousel like a rock. I suspect I wasn't the only one.
- plehoux 11y ago"But as we deepened our focus on collaboration, we realized there’s only so much an email app can do to fundamentally fix email." We beg to differ. We built a new email client around the very idea that it could fix team collaboration: https://missiveapp.com https://missiveapp.com The thing is… with Sparrow, Mailbox and countless others before, it is getting really hard for a team like us to convince people to invest their time into our new product. People are increasingly worried that we will just fold/sell in the coming months and that their time will be lost. Establishing credibility in the email space is hard and takes time, there is no shortcut, announcements like this one doesn't help us.
- goeric 11y agoDespite all the bugs and the short-falls of the Mac app update, it had the best snooze feature that I've come to live by in my email workflow. It looks like Polymail is an evolved Mailbox (with a eerily similar design/features) and Nylas N1 has a lot of potential as well.
- refriedbeans3 11y agoWould be great if they Dropbox opensourced Mailbox's codebase. I don't want to have to go back to apple mail...
- akulbe 11y agoThis makes me worry that Dropbox is next. btsync just became a lot more appealing to me.
- pilif 11y agoAt least in case of mailbox, I would say they were sherlocked by Google Inbox: nearly as good an UI but without the need to share access to email with a third party. I really never liked that aspect of mailbox and I thus never used it with my primary mailbox, which meant that I practically haven't used it at all. The moment Inbox came out for google apps, I started using it to the point where it is now my primary means for accessing my mail.
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- squegles 11y agoThis is really disappointing. I have been an avid Mailbox user since beta. Does anyone have any other mail client recommendations for iOS?
- rdancer 11y agoThe single best software product since GMail, and they've shuttered it. It's a sad day for our industry.
- ptio 11y agoOh man this is sad news. I'm currently using Mailbox as my default mail app on Android. I'll pay for it is there was an option.
- coldtea 11y agoThe message from this: outside of backup, Dropbox can't/won't sustain a small scale but profitable business for the long term (e.g. Basecamp style). So don't even consider adopting and trusting their new "Paper" collaboration offering.
- free2rhyme214 11y agoYeah. Dropbox Paper is like Box Notes. It's nifty but why switch from Google docs?
- wodenokoto 11y agoBecause your documents are already in dropbox. I believe that is the main value proposition.
- free2rhyme214 11y agoHow is that a value proposition? You still have to open Office to see your word, excel or ppt docs. DB simply looks at what Box is doing and puts it on their backlog in JIRA.
- jfernandez 11y agoThis is a huge blow, this was the mail app I used exclusively on the phone. What's the best alternative? Inbox? It seemed a bit complex when I first tried it out.
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- marknutter 11y agoWhy, oh why can't companies just focus on their core competency? Does Dropbox really consider the sync-and-share problem solved?
- free2rhyme214 11y agoI'd love to see what else Dropbox is working on besides Paper and enterprise features.
- robocaptain 11y agoUg. Carousel solved so many problems for me. Is it just that people don't like having multiple apps? Is the barrier to entry too high? I thought carousel struck a nice balance in not really forcing anyone to use the app, if they were simply on the receiving end. I hope Dropbox keeps their word on incorporating the carousel functionality into the main app. I don't particularly care what they want to call it.
- orky56 11y agoThis Gmail strategy helped me transition from Mailbox: http://lifehacker.com/this-gtd-workflow-is-how-i-finally-got-my-email-inbox-u-1505884967 http://lifehacker.com/this-gtd-workflow-is-how-i-finally-got... Essentially use Multiple Inboxes as well as some filters/labels to create the basic GTD categories. I've modified it to use Labels since I find the various stars inefficient. I have inboxes for "Work On" (label:Priority), "Someday" (label:Someday), "Waiting" (label:*Waiting), and "Reference" (is:starred). This combined with services offered from Boomerang (http://www.boomeranggmail.com/ http://www.boomeranggmail.com/) get pretty close to what I was trying to accomplish with Mailbox. It's not as elegant but I don't have to worry about using a proprietary email client that might not be around.
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- fooly_wk 11y agoFor those disppointed with Mailbox's abandonment, I'd love to hear your feedback on Polymail (https://polymail.io https://polymail.io). We're in private Alpha right now, but we have many similar features to Mailbox like Read Later + some better ones like Email Tracking & Send Later. Feel free to DM me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/foolywk https://twitter.com/foolywk) if you'd like to be added to our next Alpha release!
- shdon 11y agoIt says only "coming soon on OS X". Does that mean it is an OS X desktop app only? (I currently use Mailbox on Android, and am very interested in finding a replacement, but could only care less about OS X if paid to do so).
- wodenokoto 11y agoI'm not really sure how we are supposed to give feedback to a closed alpha test, but many people here are discussing the business viability of native email clients, so maybe you can talk about the market and what the business prospects are when entering this market.
- fooly_wk 11y agoThere's definitely a large subset of the market which expect not to pay for an email client, but there are many email products available now with many paying customers e.g. yesware, streak, sidekick, etc. There are certainly ways of capturing revenue from the email marketing, but I think that Mailbox was too focused particularly on the entire 'Inbox Zero' aspect of the product and never expanded much beyond that.
- Lazare 11y agoCrap. I absolutely adored Mailbox; it did everything I wanted, but especially: 1) The ability to snooze emails 2) A really nice UI on both OS X and Android letting me quickly swipe emails to archive or snooze them. 3) A unified inbox that showed multiple email accounts as a single inbox. Does anyone have any suggestions for a mail client that meets these requirements? I'm quite happy to pay. Edit: Google Inbox doesn't have a unified inbox, which drives me nuts, and nothing else I know of has message snoozing. ANY suggestions welcomed.
- cwe 11y agoOutlook. Seriously. It supports multiple accounts I believe (I only use my work exchange account so not positive), and it has scheduling of messages. The scheduling hasn't synced very well to the desktop version in my experience, but a lot of people have called it the best gmail client on iOS.
- Lazare 11y agoWell, I guess it's worth a shot. Although my primary OS for dealing with email is OS X and I see the OS X app is $130? Acceptable for a good Mailbox replacement, but a bit pricy for a gamble. :( And "The scheduling hasn't synced very well to the desktop version in my experience" worries me a lot.
- mynameisvlad 11y agoHe means the Outlook iOS/Android app, which was a 3rd party app Microsoft bought (Accompli) and further upgraded by the people at Sunrise Calendar (also bought out) to make the app that it is today. Outlook for OSX, though, is still the classic Microsoft Office for OSX app, so it doesn't have any of those upgrades. The iOS app is my daily driver, and it works splendidly.
- ParkerK 11y ago>nothing else I know of has message snoozing. ANY suggestions welcomed. The new Outlook mobile apps support scheduling for later. I don't think it's as nice as Mailbox was (with multiple choices for when to schedule) but it's the closest thing I know of.
- lechevalierd3on 11y agoPart of me is really mad, the iOS app works well and does the work. Part of me is liberated, the OSX app is buggy as hell and drives me nuts every day. Apple MailI now?
- cognivore 11y agoAwesome. Hey, start-up type peoples. Good luck getting me to use any of your nifty new software. Cause every time I do, and invest my time, data, and learning in you, you sell out then disappear. There's fool me twice thing in here, but I'm not that inspired to be clever with it.
- grandalf 11y agoI've been using carousel and have switched a lot of family members to it. I was using Snapjoy before (which Dropbox acquired and killed), and had done the same thing. I find the announcement about Carousel extremely disappointing. I'm definitely going to think twice about using Dropbox for anything other than simple file storage in the future. Pictures are peoples' lives, their families, and their memories. This is a big part of file storage and I thought Carousel was a superb product on desktop and mobile. Sorry to vent but I haven't been this disappointed about a product being killed (for no apparent reason) in a long time.
- ssharp 11y agoThis is one of the reasons I just accept the flaws with iCloud Photos and go with it. My other family members can use it easily enough and I don't have to worry about it going away.
- Animats 11y ago"In 2013, we acquired Mailbox ... In 2014, we launched Carousel ... Mailbox will be shut down on February 26th, 2016, and Carousel will be shut down on March 31st, 2016." Someone should track the lifespan of cloud products. It's not long; the median is probably less than five years. Dependence on a cloud product is risky. They can go away so fast.
- ktamura 11y agoWhen Carousel came out, I thought it was a great opportunity for Dropbox to go up the stack and blogged about it: http://kiyototamura.tumblr.com/post/82662241570/dropboxs-carousel-is-different http://kiyototamura.tumblr.com/post/82662241570/dropboxs-car... Ultimately, I am beginning to think that Dropbox simply does not have the product DNA =/
- noinput 11y ago@teej nailed it: > teej: "... They signed the keys away to Drew Houston and the management team at Dropbox. Mailbox dies the moment Drew decides to kill it." > dhouston: it's not going anywhere :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5381671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5381671
- erikb 11y agoIt always feels awkward when reading such a note, seeing that it gets a lot of upvotes and never heard about any of these products before. What was mailbox? Like many other people I'm pretty unhappy with the mailbox choices I have nowadays. In fact, I have to use four(!) mailbox programs to handle everything I need. Pain in the trashcan, I tell ya.
- imron 11y ago> The Carousel and Mailbox teams have built products that are loved by many people And now those people will hate Dropbox.
- jheriko 11y agothankfully many is very different to most. its a pretty good approximation that compared to dropbox /nobody/ uses those products.
- imron 11y agoThat's right, and it sucks to be those users - I'm not one of them, but I have experienced similar things in the past which led to a vehement dislike of the parent company that did it.
- jheriko 11y agosure. i don't disagree, but i can see why people would make these decisions. its a tradeoff between small numbers of angry users and burning money on something that is failing.
- jtwebman 11y agoAt least they could do was open source it!
- tuananh 11y agoMonetization around email is just hard. Except for one like Google.
- dvcrn 11y agoThat is very sad. Carousel was a essential part of my photo editing and backup workflow. Maybe need to investigate switching back to drive. The problem with them was though that photos backed up with "Google Photos" didn't appear inside drive and vice-versa. Did they fix that by now? Mailbox never worked fine for me and had bugs in every corner.
- chrisau 11y agoAssholes. Getting sick of big companies buying great small products, and shutting them down after "trying" to make them work out. Still hadn't had time to get over MS killing Sunrise, and now this.
- morganvachon 11y agoIndeed, I had finally taken the plunge on Carousel for its killer feature: Freeing up space on my 16GB iPhone while having the photos instantly available if I needed them. Carousel was a breath of fresh air; it had no issues with backing up photos over WiFi or cellular data, unlike the main Dropbox app. Now it's back to the unreliable and slow Dropbox app for photo syncing.
- slg 11y agoAre these really even products if they have no plans or even really options for monetization? Mailbox was a free app with no ads and no freemium features. It was doomed from the start. Although Kudos to the founders there that were able to turn a good idea, a great marketing strategy, and a couple months of work from a small team into an immediate 9 figure exit. Those founders knew what they were doing.
- brandonbloom 11y agoWhile I too dislike when stuff I use is shutdown, there's another possible way to look at this. Maybe the product lived a much longer life than it would have otherwise, had the original creators abandoned it after failing to make sufficient money on it directly.
- finalight 11y agoerm, what? I don't even there's mailbox and carousel i've been just using the basic feature of dropbox, which is just upload/download/sync files did they put in effort to advertise it?
- aylmao 11y agohttps://www.change.org/p/dropbox-open-source-mailbox-app/share?after_sign_exp=default&just_signed=true https://www.change.org/p/dropbox-open-source-mailbox-app/sha...
- danieltoshea 11y agoIt is too bad they decided not to open source Mailbox. I would have liked to run my own mailbox service perhaps as a docker container.
- shinratdr 11y agoMakes you wonder why they even bought them in the first place. There was no possible integration there, the only move was expansion into other markets. So buy them, wait two years, then kill them off? Great use of funds there Dropbox, I guess you put the stellar bunch in charge of the development roadmap in charge of acquisitions too.
- cat-dev-null 11y agoAn open-source Mailbox clone could be popular, and a way for mobile (iOS/Android/etc.) developers to show their chops. The self-starter types of people tend to route around obstructions and unpopular decisions by doing it themselves, better.
- sherifmansour 11y agoI've always been puzzled at the two acquisitions. I know it's easier to say this in hindsight but there are a few reflections many had upon hearing the initial acquisition of those tools: * So you've acquired a Gmail client - why? Surely whatever good comes out of that Google would just re-create into Gmail. Sure enough: Inbox. I'm not even sure how this would have fitted into the Dropbox strategy? I doubt they would have wanted to be acquired by Gooogle. I doubt they would have wanted to compete in the email space... If it was just to get attachments from email surely there are many other ways to solve this problem. * Second thought: Dropbox has acquired a photo sharing and organization app. Surely they don't think they will win over Facebook, iPhoto, Flickr... What for? Store the photos? Even if it's an awesome product, don't they just risk Apple Photos getting better? Or wait... Here comes Google Photos. Inbox. Google Photos. iPhotos. Facebook Moments. It feels like both Mailbox and Carosel were just ticking timebombs.
- emailforward 11y agoWe're a group of folks interested in solving this problem - perhaps by building a stable self-funded business around the most widely requested email client features, or perhaps by driving an open source movement in the community. Maybe both. Help us help you. http://goo.gl/forms/9AVIGXNgkc http://goo.gl/forms/9AVIGXNgkc Note: All responses to this survey will be shared with the Hacker News community within 24-48 hours after initial posting.