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Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

blogs.dropbox.com

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Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#71
post #50

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.

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 sl…

> 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. :)

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#72

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?

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.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#73

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?

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

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#74
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 fo…

Gmail on mobile does have a unified inbox:

http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/30/gmail-for-android-gets-a-un...

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#75

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?

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

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#76
post #55
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Hey there-- I work at Nylas.

We've structured our business to... actually have a business. Our team spent the first year selling APIs to developers [1] which already power lots of paid apps. The N1 mail app we released two months ago[2] follows this and will have paid features next year.

Plus both are open source free software, and quite popular on GitHub. [3]

[1] https://nylas.com/features/

[2] https://nylas.com/n1

[3] http://github.com/nylas/

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#80
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.

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