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Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

blogs.dropbox.com

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Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#31

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.

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.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#33
post #8

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.

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

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.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#34

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…

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

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#38
post #15

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.

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 ev…

> 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.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#39
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/

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#40
post #15

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.

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 ev…

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.
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