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Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

blogs.dropbox.com

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Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#331

Post by toomuchtodo »

NeutronBoy wrote: post #305
toomuchtodo wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does every startup need to aim to take over the world overnight? Its preferable to work on a project for a few years instead of half/full decades.

It's perfectly feasible to build a smaller, sustainable business then sell to someone who does want to have that lifestyle.

Of course its feasible! But is it preferable? No. I want to work on on something for 2-3 years, tops, and then cash out and or move on. I don't want to grind a project for the next 10 years. Life is too short for that.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#332

Post by s73v3r »

Spooky23 wrote: post #139
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.

Everyone want to "fix" email, and replace it with some proprietary bullshit. Email isn't broken.

Email is plenty broken. Spam, for example.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#333

Post by Lazare »

cwe wrote: post #309
Lazare wrote: post #308

Crap. I absolutely adored Mailbox; it did everything I wanted, but especially: 1) The ability to snooze emails 2) A really nice UI on both OS X and Android letting me quickly swipe emails to archive or snooze them. 3) A unified inbox that showed multiple email accounts as a single inbox. Does anyone have any suggestions for a mail client that meets these requirements? I'm quite happy to pay. Edit: Google Inbox doesn'…

Outlook. Seriously. It supports multiple accounts I believe (I only use my work exchange account so not positive), and it has scheduling of messages. The scheduling hasn't synced very well to the desktop version in my experience, but a lot of people have called it the best gmail client on iOS.

Well, I guess it's worth a shot.

Although my primary OS for dealing with email is OS X and I see the OS X app is $130? Acceptable for a good Mailbox replacement, but a bit pricy for a gamble. :(

And "The scheduling hasn't synced very well to the desktop version in my experience" worries me a lot.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#334

Post by tedmiston »

Lazare wrote: post #308

Crap. I absolutely adored Mailbox; it did everything I wanted, but especially: 1) The ability to snooze emails 2) A really nice UI on both OS X and Android letting me quickly swipe emails to archive or snooze them. 3) A unified inbox that showed multiple email accounts as a single inbox. Does anyone have any suggestions for a mail client that meets these requirements? I'm quite happy to pay. Edit: Google Inbox doesn'…

Airmail doesn't support snoozing, but it does have a unified inbox and nice UI. IMO it's a bit overloaded with power and features, but it's worth consideration.

Another commenter pointed out that you can try/use the full version for free in their beta program.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#335

Post by meesterdude »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #331
NeutronBoy wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's perfectly feasible to build a smaller, sustainable business then sell to someone who does want to have that lifestyle.

Of course its feasible! But is it preferable? No. I want to work on on something for 2-3 years, tops, and then cash out and or move on. I don't want to grind a project for the next 10 years. Life is too short for that.

thats certainly your choice to make, but my point was simply that there is an alternative way to do things. For me, if I could work on my best idea for the rest of my life, and it could go and serve the needs of millions of people (or even just a few thousand) across the globe, that would be pretty cool.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#336

Post by sethd »

grinich wrote: post #89
sethd wrote: 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)

I tried it with a single account, the UI is nice but I kind of prefer a more dense UI for email. I'm probably just really used to Airmail's UI, it's similar to what Sparrow used to be and I felt that was approaching perfection at the time.

Also the memory footprint was a little large but that's understandable since it's built on Chrome/Node. Web browsers and development related processes (mostly Ruby) are my top memory consumers right now, I'd rather not have my email client join their ranks.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#337

Post by toomuchtodo »

meesterdude wrote: post #335
toomuchtodo wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course its feasible! But is it preferable? No. I want to work on on something for 2-3 years, tops, and then cash out and or move on. I don't want to grind a project for the next 10 years. Life is too short for that.

thats certainly your choice to make, but my point was simply that there is an alternative way to do things. For me, if I could work on my best idea for the rest of my life, and it could go and serve the needs of millions of people (or even just a few thousand) across the globe, that would be pretty cool.

I don't disagree with you at all, but the idea I want to work on isn't going to make me wealthy. I just need enough money in the bank so that basic needs are met, rent is taken care of, and I can go work on fixing homelessness, dysfunctional healthcare systems, etc.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#338

Post by nl »

igorgue wrote: post #273
potatolicious wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Clearly Dropbox thought there was at least a $100MM opportunity" The opportunity was the team, not the product they were producing. Say you had a room full of math prodigies, but all they were doing was watching TV all day. You hire these math prodigies for $X and put them to work solving math problems - this doesn't mean that watching TV is worth $X, in fact it likely means the opposite, that their value is under…

Yeah but that's ridiculous, they had only 13 employees that's 7.6MM per employee over the span of 2.5 years, some of them I'm sure they left already... You tell me when this starts making sense because it just doesn't right now. Too much money! I don't care how big of a genius you are you're not worth that as a developer of an email client, and honestly to write an Email client is not genius level shit. The UI was do…

The deal was stock and cash, so it is pretty much impossible to judge how good a deal this was for Dropbox[1]. Stock is a very cheap way for a company to acquire another.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/mailbox-cost-dropbox-around...

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#339

Post by kad3nce »

vessenes wrote: post #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.

I've been using Spark from Readdle for a while. It has customizeable swipe actions, so I was able to make it mimic Mailbox quite well. Has some other cool features too.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#340

Post by hussong »

x0x0 wrote: post #261
bdotdub wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

I remember paying for The Bat! and loving it.
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