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Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

blogs.dropbox.com

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Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#231

Post by alanh »

jonursenbach wrote: post #210
vu0tran wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Without joining the rush to judgement, allow me to say that I find this to be a legitimate inquiry, especially given the nature of your appeal in this thread. Care to respond?

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#232

Post by joshstrange »

reverend_gonzo wrote: post #73
nathan_f77 wrote: post #36

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.

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

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#234

Post by hunvreus »

schneidmaster wrote: post #3

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.

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?

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#235

Post by coldtea »

exelius wrote: post #164
TeMPOraL wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

VCs are totally the problem here. It's not that VCs are bad people who want to screw over users, but their business model requires them to get payback on their bets, even if it's small. It can be hard to know up front if an idea is viable as a hockey-stick software company or if customer acquisition is much, much harder - often because you don't know who your target customer will be specifically until you've iterated…

>VCs are totally the problem here. It's not that VCs are bad people who want to screw over users, but their business model requires them to get payback on their bets, even if it's small.

Doesn't that make them bad though? I mean it's like saying "It's not that the mafia are bad people who want to screw over people, but their business model requires them to blackmail and occasionally kill" (not comparing levels of "badness" of course, merely showing the problem in said reasoning).

It's not like following a particular "business model" is not a decision people get to make. And if people take the VC model that favours acquihires, then they very much have decided to do stuff that screws with users.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#236

Post by mdeeks »

schneidmaster wrote: post #51
cm2012 wrote: 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…

Message searching for Gmail in Outlook iOS/Android is piped directly from Gmail itself. Your search is forwarded on to them and results are displayed back in the app. Immediate search results are from on-device and then filled with the Gmail results after they are received. So if the results are bad, then maybe Gmail has a secret API they use to make their app better.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#237

Post by threatofrain »

xxpor wrote: post #22
cm2012 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

The Gmail app actually allows 3rd-party IMAP connections.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#239

Post by ptio »

orliesaurus wrote: post #155
dutchbrit wrote: post #135

Time to make an open-source replacement?

or just open source this?

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/

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