Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2015/12/saying-goodbye-to-carousel-and-mailbox/

by _freu • 11 years ago

624 421 11 years ago

blogs.dropbox.com

nikolay6• 11 years ago

So stupid, really! Carousel is the only Dropbox product I use and it works really great!

SingAlong• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years ago

If 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.

jwcooper• 11 years ago

They'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.

nikolay6• 11 years ago

Yes. 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!

schneidmaster3• 11 years ago

Ugh. 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• 11 years ago

What do you not like about Outlook or Gmail (I think the market leaders)?

zimpenfish2• 11 years ago

They 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.)

xxpor• 11 years ago

Outlook (I assume you're referring to the mobile app, not the desktop client) puts all of your emails on MS's servers, so that's a no go for lots of people.

Last I checked, the gmail app only worked with gmail accounts.

jarin• 11 years ago

It's such a pain to process hundreds of emails in Outlook, and there's no snoozing like there is with Mailbox or Inbox.

ketralnis• 11 years ago

I'm not the parent but Outlook's IMAP support is quirky at best and I very strongly prefer native applications to web applications. I also host my own email which marks gmail right out.

Email should be simple but there has been essentially no lasting innovation in email clients in a very long time unless you really want Google to host it for you

zyxley3• 11 years ago

The "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.

schneidmaster3• 11 years ago

Gmail on mobile still doesn't have a unified inbox, and it also doesn't have features I've come to depend on such as snoozing messages. I usually use Inbox by Gmail on mobile, which also lacks a unified inbox and (bizarrely enough) support for HTML signatures but does have pretty good message snoozing, and I like how it handles bundling.

Outlook (incidentally, another example of my original complaint, as it's just former email startup Acompli with a fresh skin although obviously it's probably not getting shut down anytime too soon) doesn't have very good message searching for Gmail, which is a common complaint I have for non-Google mail apps. Obviously, I get that Google has a huge built-in advantage here; but if your email app is going to support the "Mailbox paradigm" of abandoning folders/traditional labels in favor of just marking things as done, it also needs to have search functionality that can back it up. Outlook was also really buggy for me when I last tried it, although that was a little while ago so it may have improved.

erikb2• 11 years ago

Seriously how can you even like Outlook? Yes people need to use it, but want? Does anybody really know other mail programs and wants to use Outlook?

untog5• 11 years ago

Probably because there simply isn't money to be made in being an e-mail startup.

Or, more correctly, there isn't enough money to be made to satisfy VC investors. Mailbox and the like could have lived quite comfortably as paid-for apps with comfortable but small levels of profit, but that isn't what Silicon Valley rewards.

EDIT: also, IIRC Apple's restrictions on background processing meant that they needed to have every user's account set up on their servers to process push notifications. Did that ever change? If not that's a non trivial expense/complication to scaling, especially when you're up against an OS-integrated app that doesn't have those restrictions.

minimaxir3• 11 years ago

I thought the business proposition of Mailbox and Carousel was providing more utility/centralization around Dropbox services/storage (via file attachments and photo storage). Which never was a great idea, but still.

bdotdub• 11 years ago

there isn't enough money to be made to satisfy VC investors. Mailbox and the like could have lived quite comfortably as paid-for apps with comfortable

I'm not sure that's true (see: Sparrow). I just don't think there is enough demand for people to want to pay for an email client. I imagine for a huge majority of people, default mail client's work fine enough for personal use.

jethro_tell• 11 years ago

Also, it's not 'disruptive' which isn't very sexy. At the same time, no one's really disrupted email (probably since gmail) and even sms for the most part, as a form of communication because they are the only cross platform with a very low barrier to entry. Note that all the sms replacement apps still use sms as a fall back since it's a shit show of walled garden apps.

jordigh3• 11 years ago

Do you think Nylas is headed towards this eventual doom too?

I guess Mailpile isn't trying to be commercial, so perhaps it will keep soldiering on the power of donations for as long as that keeps up.

mbesto2• 11 years ago

Yet that same Silicon Valley rewarded Mailbox with $100MM in an acquisition...

dirkdk• 11 years ago

And you are limited by a 30 year old standard (IMAP) with an insane message format. Building a truly new email experience would require a new protocol as well.

refriedbeans32• 11 years ago

Side effect of this is that Mailbox was the first to support out of the box notifications on my Apple Watch + gmail accounts. Apple mail doesn't monitor/push emails from Gmail so you don't get notified on the watch.

erikpukinskis• 11 years ago

That's because making a big pile of money the Silicon Valley way requires two things: a product, and a moat. It's not hard to create an email product, but email moats are hard because it's an anarchist technology by design.

patmcguire• 11 years ago

You wouldn't expect Slack to be able to make so much off of messaging - there's got to be some way to be better enough to make money.

sethd2• 11 years ago

Yeah, after Sparrow was killed off I switched to Airmail for OS X (currently using Airmail 2). It's not without flaws and I'm always keeping an eye on the options.

On iOS I'm pretty happy with Microsoft Outlook (can't believe I just said that), I haven't found anything better yet.

I do use multiple accounts extensively so that limits my choices to just those clients that support multiple accounts well (unified inbox, etc).

grinich6• 11 years ago

If you're a desktop email aficionado, I'd love to hear your feedback on N1. It's kind of similar to Mailbox desktop, but works cross-platform and is open source. https://nylas.com/n1

(Also feel free to write me directly. mg@nylas.com)

cbhl2• 11 years ago

Webmail is way too ubiquitous for desktop email software to be worth the million dollars a year it costs to hire five bay-area software developers to build and maintain it. I imagine Dropbox would have kept it around if it saw more user traction, but it didn't.

Inbox by GMail has some of the ideas from the Sparrow team incorporated in it, but it's only really usable on mobile. (The desktop Inbox web app is awfully slow compared to, say, GMail or Outlook.com.)

When Hotmail came out, who still paid for Eudora licenses?

That said, if a decent email client is that important to you, don't underestimate the impact you could have building it yourself as open source on evenings and weekends. And if you don't think it's worth your time to do that much, why would you expect anyone else to?

schneidmaster3• 11 years ago

And if you don't think it's worth your time to do that much, why would you expect anyone else to?

I don't expect anyone else to build me a FOSS email client. I do expect that by 2015 somebody would have figured out a way for me to give them money for a good email experience. :)

xorcist• 11 years ago

HotMaiL didn't make a dent in Eudora market share. What killed Eudora was Outlook Express, bundled with the operating system for free. Incidentally, the same strategy was used against Netscape (who then proceeded to quickly kill itself when faced with that prospect).

azinman24• 11 years ago

I still love Apple Mail... and it's native. In fact I think it's the best email platform out there currently, although I haven't tried N1 yet.

I'd like Inbox-like features theoretically, but the fundamental UX/UI is done better than anyone else IMHO.

Spooky233• 11 years ago

Everyone want to "fix" email, and replace it with some proprietary bullshit. Email isn't broken.

downtide• 11 years ago

Like many things, clients could do with some usability enhancements. E.g. encrypted mail. Without which, I find it off-putting.

s73v3r6• 11 years ago

Email is plenty broken. Spam, for example.

coffee2• 11 years ago

Email, unfortunately, is very broken.

Spam, in the I'm getting random Viagra emails sense, is being handle very well lately.

That said... We have a very large industry that easily helps you get your "ham" (the mail in-between Spam and mail you really want to receive) inboxed.

This is email from legit companies. Maybe you signed up to a newsletter, maybe you didn't. Maybe you're just getting a cold email. But those emails are inboxed.

People are still complaining about being overwhelmed by their email, even though our Spam filters have improved greatly.

tedmiston3• 11 years ago

Am I the only one still using Sparrow to this day?

Sure the build is 2+ years old, but the usability is just incredible. I haven't found anything better on desktop since.

CptMouse• 11 years ago

Airmail is quite good, and AFAIK you can turn off some of its many features. http://airmailapp.com/ (hint: You can use it for free if you use the beta version)

I was a huge fan of Sparrow (like you, I used it long after the updates stopped), then Airmail and Mailbox, but now I simply use the Gmail web app. I follow the zero inbox method strictly, so I only need to read/archive/reply/search emails, and it does a decent job at it (except for search where it's best in class), while being simple and non-confusing.

spike021• 11 years ago

I was, but hadn't bought a license before the acquisition, so that part of things got a bit annoying. IIRC there are ads that take up a good amount of space.

robbyking• 11 years ago

I still bounce around email clients every couple months

Between two-factor authentication, application specific passwords and the notification center, configuring a new mail client can be a lot of work to have to redo every couple months. I did this for years before finally settling on the default clients for both iOS and OS X, and I've noticed a lot of my coworkers have done the same.

vu0tran4• 11 years ago

Yeah, it's frustrating. I was using Sparrow until it got acquired and then shut down. Then switched to Mailbox... which then got acquired... Whoops.

I ended up so frustrated I created my own email client in my spare time and half accidentally got into YC S14 haha. You can check it out here: http://www.slidemailapp.com

I'll admit, as a previous poster said, it's not without it's flaws but we try hard and we really do spend all our waking hours improving it since it's our baby and we love it to death. We've been beta testing the private current release with a lot of Hacker News users and I think we're fast approaching something really awesome!

Feel free to email me at vu0tran@gmail.com for a beta invite and would LOVE to hear your suggestions of what you'd like to see in an email client!!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313425

jonursenbach• 11 years ago

What's your end goal with this? Surely it must be getting acquired by one of the big email providers.

stdbrouw• 11 years ago

Nitpick: "If you delete the application from your phone, your data is gone for good" is the worst possible way to phrase what is otherwise an excellent feature :-)

klapinat0r• 11 years ago

vu0tran, I'm almost sold. It looks great, and I love the private part (which was the one thing I could barely live with in Mailbox).

If you do snooze[1], I'll throw all my money at you :)

[1]: which of course either requires server side (e.g. Mailbox) or (preferably) client side logic. I'd be fine with the latter, but I agree it's a non-trivial problem.

dmbaggett4• 11 years ago

I co-founded ITA Software and have been using some of the proceeds from the sale to Google to fund an email startup. (http://inky.com) The challenges outlined in this thread are all accurate. If you're thinking about putting effort (or money) behind an email startup, think again. I simply don't believe it's doable for a normal startup (i.e., one without a crazy rich guy plowing money into it until it's good enough). The VC-backed "winners" will all get aqui-hired, and then the acquirers will be unhappy because what they bought wasn't actually good enough for prime time.

Here are just a handful of the reasons:

- It is deceptively hard. Like airfare pricing, most people think it's a couple weekends of work, when in fact it's at least 5 years and millions of lines of code to get to a real MVP that someone could use instead of Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail, etc... The set of abstractions required to do it right are unobvious and nontrivial, and you end up with unfixable problems if you don't get them all right. We've rewritten Inky essentially from scratch twice, and only in the current version 3 (circa October 2015) do we finally have the abstractions correct. Look at the Thunderbird bugzilla logs and you will find thousands of bug entries, many of which go on for pages and pages. ITA was similar, by the way: 1996-2001 was basically iteration to get to an MVP.

And because it's not just hard, but deceptively hard, founders and their teams systematically underestimate the effort required, which leads to all kinds of failure modes. Even in the success stores like Mailbox, the teams basically punt on a number of hard problems that really are required for an MVP (like properly sanitizing HTML, supporting Exchange and IMAP "for real", proper support for all the weirdly encoded mail you see in the wild, encrypted mail via S/MIME, etc.)

- The other entities you have to work with are a complete nightmare, and as the client app everything appears to be your fault. Google, Apple, Yahoo, etc. just do whatever the hell they want, randomly, have broken servers they never fix, and place arbitrary problematic restrictions on clients: all limit clients to a small number of connections, and Apple won't let an email app run in the background, so you can't support "real" push notifications without keeping the user's credentials unencrypted in the cloud (which I refuse to do). Google, out of the blue, started banning clients that didn't use oAuth, sending users scary messages about unsafe software. oAuth is great, but just breaking everyone who doesn't support it yet is really, really nasty.

- VCs absolutely hate the space. Email startups have been dogs forever, and every name-brand VC has been burned on a crappy email investment.

- Consumers simply don't care about usability, privacy, or anything else enough to not use what comes with their phones.

- Security-conscious people who might pay for something that's genuinely secure never believe anything is genuinely secure in practice unless it's open source... in which case there is no business model.

- Existing mainstream clients are ironically sticky, because once users develop coping strategies to deal with the quirks of the client they're forced to use, they never want to invest the effort into learning the quirks of a new client.

So why do I work on it? Because in my opinion it's a really important problem that affects billions of people -- and one that needs to be solved properly by folks who are doing it not just as a data harvesting operation, loss-leader to sell devices, or as a way to build a moat around a core offering (search).

g4k• 11 years ago

Do you plan to add PGP support?

_dps• 11 years ago

It is deceptively hard [...] The set of abstractions required to do it right are unobvious and nontrivial ...

I would be very interested to hear more about this aspect, if you would be willing to share. I'm always curious about things that sound like they should be simple but end up being surprisingly complicated if you want do do a good job :)

free2rhyme2145• 11 years ago

In 1996 there was a huge need for airfare search. Look at the success you've had.

On the contrary email in 2015 isn't a huge need or a pain point for most people.

Since you're entering a crowded market your product has to be 10X better. Currently it's probably not which is why most people perceive Inky as a marginal improvement.

Still I'd love to see other projects you're working on Dave. Clearly you're talented and with the right idea I could see you getting back to where ITA & Crash was.

gcr6• 11 years ago

I tried Inky when it was a "show HN" thread two(?) years ago. It was solid then, and I'm sure it's only gotten better now.

Meekro• 11 years ago

Fascinating! I'd love to read more about the challenges involved in both airfare pricing, and email! Can you link to any posts that go into greater technical detail?

Also, regarding Inky-- I just spent a few minutes browsing your site, and it didn't answer my first question: why should I switch to your product from gmail?

hunvreus• 11 years ago

I'm genuinely curious as to what it is that Gmail (for example) doesn't provide yet that is so essential to dealing with emails. I gave a try to Mailbox but didn't see what the added value was, other than a couple UX gimmicks (some of which are now part of many email clients).

Was there a killer feature that I missed?

kalmi10• 11 years ago

When Mailbox first came out, there was no Google Inbox, no snoozing, and the ios e-mail experience was lacking and sluggish in general. Mailbox fixed all that, and it was the first to properly do so that we trusted. We trusted it as it was by the well established Dropbox.

But since Inbox came out, I have seen no reason to open Mailbox, and I would say that Mailbox actually inspired Inbox.

darkr5• 11 years ago

Off the top of my head - offline support, PGP support, multi-account support, decent mail-list/threading support, separation of client from service provider..

I'm actually quite a fan of the gmail interface; it is one of the most usable webmail experiences in my opinion (I use google apps both at work and for personal use). For day-long usage, I'd rather stick with mutt/vim.

lobster_johnson• 11 years ago

Multiple accounts. I have multiple work accounts (several companies) and a personal one. Having each open in tabs/window would be too much. I use Apple's mail apps on Mac and iOS, with a single unified inbox.

codemac3• 11 years ago

Proprietary tools just aren't worth the turnover for me.

It's untenable to depend on developer tools that a company owns. I love free software, but in all honesty the reason I incorporate it is more selfish. My workstation is exclusively free software so I don't have to be abreast of business news to get my job done.

I've basically settled on my emacs + notmuch + offlineimap solution not because I think it's better than all email clients -- but it's the one that if all parties involved quit, I could probably use it for another 10-ish years.

For example - offlineimap right now still has this old bug where sometime it uses all my cpu (and a bunch of memory) in some sync case. Ok, I don't have time to debug this. I set limits and have it be killed when that state occurs. Annoying? Sure. Have to configure whole new mail client? Nope!

darkr5• 11 years ago

I moved from offlineimap to mbsync (part of the iSync project) a few years ago and it has fixed most of the issues I had with offlineimap (mainly high resource usage).

gcr6• 11 years ago

How do you send email with your pipeline? msmtp?

rsp1984• 11 years ago

That is, a $100m acqui-"hire". And the problem is, probably even Dropbox thinks that way. Am I the only one who thinks this is just a bit bonkers?

grrowl• 11 years ago

FFS, just hand the product over to the community. Or have someone manage the project (security/features/quality) and accept patches from the community. Or use ANY of the revenue to hire someone outside the aqui-hire part-time to work on it.

It's such a shitty, disrespectful, dangerous pattern to buy and shutdown products. The community knows it and bemoans it every time. Blogs have been set up just to highlight how shitty it is. Countless words written about how shitty it is. This isn't like giving away free cookies and then stopping, it's like standing someone up on a date.

"—and we’re sorry. It’s not easy to say goodbye to products we all love..." but it's just business move, and business only leverages emotions and feelings when it's profitable for us.

on_and_off• 11 years ago

FWIIW, Inbox has been created by the Sparrow team (among other googlers oc), so at least it is not a case where an acquihire ends with the people working on completely unrelated things.

reverend_gonzo4• 11 years ago

That 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.

zyxley3• 11 years 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_gonzo4• 11 years ago

I 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.

eevilspock3• 11 years ago

Desktop version slated for early 2016.

https://twitter.com/sparkmailapp/status/673945229221896192

They've shown screenshots of the Mac app in dev.

aeorgnoieang• 11 years ago

But 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_gonzo4• 11 years ago

It 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.

TheBiv• 11 years ago

Here is more detail about Dropbox Paper: http://www.engadget.com/2015/10/15/dropbox-paper-team-collab...

nikolay6• 11 years ago

They 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• 11 years ago

Yeah, 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.

microtonal3• 11 years ago

They 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.

gcr6• 11 years 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.

orliesaurus2• 11 years ago

Wow - 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

minimaxir3• 11 years ago

Mailbox/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...

georgespencer• 11 years ago

Mainly stock. They acquired the engineers for a tiny fraction of Dropbox's valuation. (Today: $10bn.)

austenallred4• 11 years ago

Yeah, they're retired now

sirkneeland• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years ago

I'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• 11 years ago

Likewise, 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• 11 years ago

A 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.

Killah9112• 11 years ago

That sucks, I really like Mailbox. I guess outlook it is on iOS.

sgarrity• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years ago

Mailbox and Sunrise, two productivity apps that I liked, got acquired (Dropbox 2013, Microsoft 2015), and discontinued in 2015.

benjarrell• 11 years ago

I'm still using Sunrise to this day, is there an announcement about it being discontinued?

rodgerd• 11 years ago

Apparently so: http://appadvice.com/appnn/2015/10/microsoft-announces-plans...

(Unwelcome) news to me.

blairbeckwith• 11 years ago

I had to look for this too: http://blog.sunrise.am

nikolay6• 11 years ago

Startups beware: If you care about your products, not just about the exit, don't let yourself get acquired by Dropbox!

RyJones• 11 years ago

I 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.

TeMPOraL5• 11 years ago

Users 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.

dawson• 11 years ago

Sunrise is [being] integrated into Microsoft Outlook, I think.

tyre• 11 years ago

Locking it into a Microsoft product can be seen as the same as discontinuation.

robwilliams2• 11 years ago

Wasn't Sunrise renamed Outlook on iOS? I have Outlook on my iPhone and it looks the same as the screenshot in the below discontinuation announcement...

mynameisvlad2• 11 years ago

Accompli was renamed Outlook and then functionality from Sunrise was added in recently when they announced the sunset.

smnrchrds• 11 years ago

Another one bites the dust...

I still remember the discussion when the acquisition was announced:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5381572

I hope it was really not going anywhere.

timdiggerm• 11 years 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.

rdancer3• 11 years ago

If you put a few in the back of someone's head, technically they're not going anywhere either.

jonknee• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years ago

I'm now getting nervous about Hackpad. Been using it for years and love it to bits. Another Dropbox acquihire...

bengotow• 11 years ago

I'm afraid Hackpad is also dead—Dropbox open sourced it, and no one has touched it since October: https://github.com/dropbox/hackpad

emitstop• 11 years ago

Not 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.

Killah9112• 11 years ago

Mailbox 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.

scotchio2• 11 years ago

Cool 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/

desireco422• 11 years ago

Thank you for recommendation, I don't believe I heard about it before you mentioned it.

scotchio2• 11 years ago

No problem. I honestly liked it better than MailBox - and the built in iOS email client (for obvious reasons), Outlook, Sunrise, GMail, etc.

desireco422• 11 years ago

Check this out

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• 11 years ago

It will be brought into Airwatch and used exclusively for that.

xrjn• 11 years ago

What 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.

calgoo2• 11 years ago

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.

s73v3r6• 11 years ago

That would be just as bad, considering no one's really touched HackPad in the intervening time.

mark_l_watson2• 11 years ago

Good 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).

ucaetano• 11 years ago

Is 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• 11 years ago

Yes.

johnchristopher• 11 years ago

Then Paper is likely going to be next.

nathan_f77• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years ago

I 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 It's open source.

teaneedz• 11 years ago

The AirMail UI needs work but I use it for its support of Markdown - one of the areas that really needs polishing.

reverend_gonzo4• 11 years ago

Check out Spark by Readdle. It replaces Mailbox fairly well.

ents2• 11 years ago

Spark and Outlook seem to be the most delightful to use.

joshstrange• 11 years ago

I'm quite happy with Spark, been using it the last few months. I got tired of Gmail's webapp app.

eevilspock3• 11 years ago

Agreed! It had great functionality, including customizabiltit and the best approach to separating wheat from chaff I've seen to date. Spark is entirely client side (Though they're hinting at adding server-side features; as long as it doesn't include server-side access to my email no problem).

Mac client slated for early 2016. They support plain IMAP (yes!) and even Exchange.

snyp• 11 years ago

i think we're better of going for a paid email client instead of depending on these free ones.. that get acquired and shut down

dubroff• 11 years ago

For what it's worth, Sparrow was a paid client (~$10) with a free version that had ads and limited functionality.

calgoo2• 11 years ago

I 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/

adrianmacneil2• 11 years ago

I imagine Mailbox has a heavy server component, which would be non-trivial to get set up and running on your own.

grinich6• 11 years ago

If you're looking for an alternative, we built one at Nylas. :) https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine

slang8002• 11 years ago

That'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.

burnte2• 11 years ago

Then OS the previous version that got them purchased by Dropbox.

unfamiliar• 11 years ago

"We gave a lot of thought to open-sourcing the underlying system, and none of that thought will be elaborated on here."

austenallred4• 11 years ago

I'll elaborate on their behalf: "That would be hard and expensive and we have money to make."

joeblau• 11 years ago

Someone started a petition in an effort to lobby dropbox to do just that:

https://www.change.org/p/dropbox-open-source-mailbox-app?rec...

ents2• 11 years ago

Such 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.

avitzurel3• 11 years ago

This 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.

austenallred4• 11 years ago

I'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.

avitzurel3• 11 years ago

That 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.

skuhn2• 11 years ago

So 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.

avitzurel3• 11 years ago

What I am saying is that Mailbox was a great product, yes.

Looking at it from the outside, it seemed that Dropbox initially just continued the initial product velocity that existed from before the purchase.

After a while it seemed that the development lost steam, features were lagging and it seemed that they lost interest.

I am sure it wasn't a very well architected service and beyond that growth was "controlled" by the invite system (which ironically only fueled the growth).

The Dropbox acquisition had a lot of potential, mainly in fueling the growth by adding people/servers and ops knowledge.

So yeah, they ditched the invite system and a lot more people were using the product but what's that worth if the end decision is to drop the product all together?

What I'm failing to understand here (and I will admit it's due to non-existent investment knowledge) is what did Dropbox get out of the 100mm paid on the product and what led the decision to drop it now.

pkamb• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years ago

Sounds 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• 11 years ago

I 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.

gcr6• 11 years ago

On 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• 11 years ago

Stepping off the pity train, what out there is a good replacement for Mailbox?

slang8002• 11 years ago

You can look at https://github.com/nylas/n1 (also mentioned elsewhere in this thread)

skhatri11• 11 years ago

I 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 :)

rickyc091• 11 years ago

Wait up, you can setup apple's stock mail to push via the google exchange server.

rangibaby2• 11 years ago

I thought that one cool trick stopped working for new accounts a long time ago?

DomBlack• 11 years ago

I'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_watson2• 11 years ago

If 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.

eevilspock3• 11 years ago

Spark 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• 11 years ago

FWIW, 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.

minimaxir3• 11 years ago

Relevant Twitter discussion: https://twitter.com/mikeisaac/status/673918795707244544

flyrain• 11 years ago

That'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• 11 years ago

Ooh, 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• 11 years ago

Maybe 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• 11 years ago

Snooze 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• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years ago

I'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• 11 years ago

Frustrating as its still my favourite mail app. Although development has definitely slowed down (for desktop at least) over the past 6 months.

mkhalil2• 11 years ago

This 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• 11 years ago

What 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.

mkhalil2• 11 years ago

Nice. 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.

presidentender• 11 years ago

Rice never married.

rifung• 11 years ago

Can 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• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years ago

Outlook has it now too, which is surprising.

damontal• 11 years ago

I 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.

smackfu2• 11 years ago

It'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• 11 years ago

Ain't Google's Inbox app the same sort of thing?

Radiant• 11 years ago

So it's like Google's Inbox?

rangibaby2• 11 years ago

That'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• 11 years ago

Inbox is a very close alternative, and that's even by Google. They didn't think that through at all.

huac• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years ago

Sad, Drew had said it's not going anywhere when the acquisition was announced.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5381572

timdorr• 11 years ago

To be fair, that was 3 years ago. A lot can change in that amount of time.

jacquesm3• 11 years ago

Yes, they could do a spin-out.

jacquesm3• 11 years ago

Executive 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• 11 years ago

It'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• 11 years ago

It used to be when the company went out of business, their software still worked...

TeMPOraL5• 11 years ago

Now the trend is to export the cloud-dependent, you-buy-only-license model to the physical world. Welcome to the future.

Polarity• 11 years ago

Don't use anything that's not open source. Period.

dordoka• 11 years ago

They have opened a community thread in their forums. [0]

[0] https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/203840...

ColinWright• 11 years ago

Significant amount of discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10690716

dutchbrit• 11 years ago

Time to make an open-source replacement?

orliesaurus2• 11 years ago

or just open source this?

ptio2• 11 years ago

Will 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/

benburton• 11 years ago

Good to hear it's finally official. The Mac desktop app has been unusable for the past 6 months.

tvararu2• 11 years ago

I 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

azinman24• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

I 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.

tvararu2• 11 years ago

The reason I thought the previous version was a webview was due to the not-really-native-looking settings pane (Cmd+,), which turned into a much more typical looking one post-update.

Thank you so much for the input, and thanks for helping build something I enjoyed using.

altonzheng• 11 years ago

Glad I'm not the only one who thought the one supposed 'major' update did not add very many useful features and made the UI look cluttered. Also, it ran surprisingly well for a webview app, I don't see why they felt the need to rewrite it.

SneakerXZ• 11 years ago

It 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...

microtonal3• 11 years ago

I 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.

rdancer3• 11 years ago

Network 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?

tedmiston3• 11 years 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

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/2015/12/07/059...

tammer• 11 years ago

Perhaps 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• 11 years ago

Is 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).

gcr6• 11 years ago

On 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?

wpietri2• 11 years ago

For fans of the genre, I strongly recommend Our Incredible Journey:

http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

univalent• 11 years ago

This 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?

thejerz• 11 years ago

Can someone in the HN community please just remake Sparrow? I'll give you my money right now.

hcurtiss• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years 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

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• 11 years ago

Despite 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.

refriedbeans32• 11 years ago

Would be great if they Dropbox opensourced Mailbox's codebase. I don't want to have to go back to apple mail...

akulbe• 11 years ago

This makes me worry that Dropbox is next.

btsync just became a lot more appealing to me.

pilif• 11 years ago

At 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.

squegles• 11 years ago

This is really disappointing. I have been an avid Mailbox user since beta. Does anyone have any other mail client recommendations for iOS?

rdancer3• 11 years ago

The single best software product since GMail, and they've shuttered it. It's a sad day for our industry.

ptio2• 11 years ago

Oh 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.

coldtea2• 11 years ago

The 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.

free2rhyme2145• 11 years ago

Yeah. Dropbox Paper is like Box Notes. It's nifty but why switch from Google docs?

wodenokoto2• 11 years ago

Because your documents are already in dropbox. I believe that is the main value proposition.

jfernandez• 11 years ago

This 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.

marknutter• 11 years ago

Why, oh why can't companies just focus on their core competency? Does Dropbox really consider the sync-and-share problem solved?

free2rhyme2145• 11 years ago

I'd love to see what else Dropbox is working on besides Paper and enterprise features.

robocaptain• 11 years ago

Ug. 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• 11 years ago

This Gmail strategy helped me transition from Mailbox: 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/) 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.

fooly_wk2• 11 years ago

For those disppointed with Mailbox's abandonment, I'd love to hear your feedback on Polymail (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) if you'd like to be added to our next Alpha release!

shdon• 11 years ago

It 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).

wodenokoto2• 11 years ago

I'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_wk2• 11 years ago

There'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.

Lazare2• 11 years ago

Crap. 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• 11 years ago

Outlook. 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.

Lazare2• 11 years ago

Well, 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.

ParkerK• 11 years 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.

gadders• 11 years ago

I loved it too. Cloud Magic on Android comes close.

tedmiston3• 11 years ago

Airmail doesn't support snoozing, but it does have a unified inbox and nice UI. IMO it's a bit overloaded with power and features, but it's worth consideration.

Another commenter pointed out that you can try/use the full version for free in their beta program.

lechevalierd3on• 11 years ago

Part 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• 11 years ago

Awesome. 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• 11 years ago

I'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• 11 years ago

This 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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

When 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-car...

Ultimately, I am beginning to think that Dropbox simply does not have the product DNA =/

noinput• 11 years 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

erikb2• 11 years ago

It 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.

imron2• 11 years ago

The Carousel and Mailbox teams have built products that are loved by many people

And now those people will hate Dropbox.

jheriko2• 11 years ago

thankfully many is very different to most.

its a pretty good approximation that compared to dropbox /nobody/ uses those products.

imron2• 11 years ago

That'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.

jtwebman• 11 years ago

At least they could do was open source it!

tuananh2• 11 years ago

Monetization around email is just hard. Except for one like Google.

dvcrn• 11 years ago

That 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• 11 years ago

Assholes.

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• 11 years ago

Indeed, 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• 11 years ago

Are 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• 11 years ago

While 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• 11 years ago

erm, 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• 11 years ago

https://www.change.org/p/dropbox-open-source-mailbox-app/sha...

danieltoshea• 11 years ago

It 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• 11 years ago

Makes 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• 11 years ago

An 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• 11 years ago

I'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• 11 years ago

We'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

Note: All responses to this survey will be shared with the Hacker News community within 24-48 hours after initial posting.

Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

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