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Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

blogs.dropbox.com

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Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#261

Post by x0x0 »

bdotdub wrote: post #38
untog wrote: 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…

> 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.

Not to mention, if you're old like me, you remember paying (I think?) $100 and then eventually $49 for eudora / upgrades for eudora. In approx 1990 dollars. We now live in a world where people pitch tantrums about paying $10 for an app, and expect perpetual upgrades for that price! So simultaneously expectations have skyrocketed and prices have plummeted.

Part of the problem is, unlike say Pinboard, an email client doesn't feel like 1-3 devs worth of work. The protocols are horrendous, you have to understand the quirks of lots of servers, etc. Plus all the UI and backend and search work. I'm not sure it's approachable as a small indie company.

There's also, of course, bad behavior by large companies such as mozilla: Thunderbird made it very difficult to build an indie email client because you have to compete on merits and against free, but they eventually got bored and just quit making it. Not to mention competing with free/ad-supported. And the semi-annual YC/vc supported email client company.

Not to mention what is coming close to active sabotage of productivity apps by the ios and mac app stores (lack of trials, lack of upgrades, etc).

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#262

Post by jacquesm »

staunch wrote: post #259
jacquesm wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

As a CEO I'm not sure which of those two explanations I'd prefer.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#263

Post by robocaptain »

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.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#264

Post by HeavenFox »

tvararu wrote: post #138

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 t…

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.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#265

Post by z1mm32m4n »

zyxley wrote: post #186
grinich wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Does it have a "snooze email" feature, though? The page suggests it doesn't, and that's (IMO) the important part of Mailbox, not just the general interface of it.

I asked this a while back when it came out, sounds like it doesn't.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10334154

Update: It looks like they have a public Trello board for voting on features. Go vote for snoozed emails!

[2]: https://trello.com/b/hxsqB6vx/n1-open-source-roadmap

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#266

Post by orky56 »

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.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#267

Post by kalmi10 »

hunvreus wrote: post #234
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?

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.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#268

Post by darkr »

codemac wrote: post #255
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.

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 t…

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).

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#269

Post by _dps »

dmbaggett wrote: post #223
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 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)…

> 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 :)

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#270

Post by darkr »

ash wrote: post #218
dirkdk wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's JMAP protocol (from fastmail.com): http://jmap.io/

I really hope this protocol takes off and gains widespread adoption.
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