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Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

blogs.dropbox.com

121–130 of 435 posts

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#121

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 :)

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

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

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#122

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.

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.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#124
post #28

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.

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

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#126

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.

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...

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#127
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly my point. Silicon Valley rewards "go big or go bust", it doesn't reward "small, sustainable business". I don't for a second blame the founders of Mailbox for doing what they did. When the market creates a strong set of incentives like this you can't really expect anyone to do anything other than take the $100m. But this is the side-effect.

VC is generally designed for big bets and big payoffs (invest in 10 risky bets in the hope that 1 pays off to cover your losses on the other 9). Less risky ventures with smaller payoffs take longer to grow, and don't satisfy the payoff requirements of the VC model. That doesn't mean they're bad companies, but there's definitely a funding gap for the type of company that will require $3M in investment up front and be…

VCs themselves aren't the problem. Big bets are fine. The problem is acquihiring. It's:

- good for founders - they get a big fat paycheck and a chance for a job in a big company

- good for VCs - a payoff, even if small, is better than no payoff at all, so they want their 9 not-so-good startups to be bought

- good for the buying company - they can literally just kill the competition by throwing money at them, + they get some proven and experienced employees, which may be worth it given the unreliability of the standard hiring process

Care to guess who this deal is not good for?

Startups are (and are being heavily marketed as) a get-rich-quick scheme. Most of the people involved are self-selected to follow this process. And all this talk about providing value to the users? That's the part of the scheme where you get used.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#128
post #89
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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)

Is the email stored on your servers ? Do we get contacts and calendars inside the app as well ? If yes, on which email providers/account types ? Why isn't this info on the website ? Thanks.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#129

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?

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.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#130
post #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 bee…

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.

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