Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox • Hacker News Board

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#411

Post by darkr » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 10:34 AM UTC

relaytheurgency wrote: post #280

darkr wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off the top of my head - offline support, PGP support, multi-account support, decent mail-list/threading support, separation of client from service provider.. I'm actually quite a fan of the gmail interface; it is one of the most usable webmail experiences in my opinion (I use google apps both at work and for personal use). For day-long usage, I'd rather stick with mutt/vim.

Folders. Didn't Gmail kill folders?

It has labels, of which you can apply one or more of to a message. When represented in IMAP, it appears as folders (though you get duplicate mail objects for every additional folder that a mail is tagged with).

If you only apply only one label to a mail at a given time, it works as a folder would do just fine.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#412

Post by darkr » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 10:36 AM UTC

codemac wrote: post #303

darkr wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Several people have suggested similar. I should do it, but the nice part of OSS: I can do it whenever it bothers me enough :) Do you have a config posted anywhere? I'd love to see exactly how hard it would be to switch.

It's pretty straightforward to configure - Arch have a decent guide on their wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Isync

Edit: Arch seems to suggest running mbsync under a global systemd unit - user units are more appropriate for this task - my units can be found here: https://github.com/rdark/systemd-user-units

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#413

Post by zimpenfish » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 10:55 AM UTC

cwyers wrote: post #188

zimpenfish wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't work with other people's IMAP/POP3 servers? (Well, the Gmail iOS app certainly doesn't; I haven't tried the Outlook client but the description in the app store suggests a very limited set of providers.)

Outlook supports IMAP, not POP3. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Set-up-email-on-iPh...

Ah, good to know, thanks.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#414

Post by johnchristopher » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 12:43 PM UTC

mtgx wrote: post #348

ucaetano wrote: post #32

Is this a sign the Dropbox's diversification strategy into a full collaboration product failed? In other words, Dropbox can't move away from being a feature?

Yes.

Then Paper is likely going to be next.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#415

Post by smackfu » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 1:56 PM UTC

aldanor wrote: post #368

smackfu wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's related to a productivity strategy called "inbox zero" where you immediately deal with every email in your inbox when you check your mail. "Deal with" might be to delete it if it's junk, respond immediately if you can, or defer it to later. A lot of these clients are aimed at making this process as fast and efficient as possible. So taking actions on an email are often just a swipe, and there are facilities to d…

Ain't Google's Inbox app the same sort of thing?

Yes, first came "inbox zero" as a concept (2006) then came Mailbox (Jan 2013) then came Google Inbox (Oct 2014).

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#416

Post by jheriko » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 2:14 PM UTC

imron wrote: post #401

jheriko wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thankfully many is very different to most. its a pretty good approximation that compared to dropbox /nobody/ uses those products.

That's right, and it sucks to be those users - I'm not one of them, but I have experienced similar things in the past which led to a vehement dislike of the parent company that did it.

sure. i don't disagree, but i can see why people would make these decisions. its a tradeoff between small numbers of angry users and burning money on something that is failing.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#417

Post by rmathew » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 2:33 PM UTC

Meekro wrote: post #381

dmbaggett wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

Fascinating! I'd love to read more about the challenges involved in both airfare pricing, and email! Can you link to any posts that go into greater technical detail? Also, regarding Inky-- I just spent a few minutes browsing your site, and it didn't answer my first question: why should I switch to your product from gmail?

For the airfare-pricing bit, see "Computational Complexity Of Air Travel Planning" [2003] by Carl de Marcken of ITA Software:

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.itasoftware.c...

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#418

Post by jessedhillon » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 3:43 PM UTC

jarek wrote: post #409

jessedhillon wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even understand what this comment is trying to say. If you use HTTP to communicate between services, and those services are not publicly accessible, the use of HTTP makes it no longer a private interface? For a site which supposedly hosting an audience of entrepreneurs and engineers -- people who understand that the value of a thing can be multi-faceted and not always obvious, or that the difficult of any job…

> I don't even understand what this comment is trying to say. If you use HTTP to communicate between services, and those services are not publicly accessible, the use of HTTP makes it no longer a private interface? Yes - if you make a HTTP call from an app, it can be trivially sniffed. Sniffing HTTP is the first thing a third party trying to discover that undocumented API would do, and you don't need source code for…

The is just so unimaginative that I can't believe you've ever seen the inside of a large operation. How are you going to sniff traffic that's communicating on a private network? And how does trivial sniffability not extend to all unencrypted traffic, ergo nearly everything is public? That's a totally useless definition and misses the point entirely.

Your point #1 is totally unjustified: you don't know what you could learn by e.g. looking at a data structure used internally. #2 shows that you are unable to answer the question of which of Dropbox's incentives are satisfied by doing this.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#419

Post by jessedhillon » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 3:46 PM UTC

jarek wrote: post #410

jessedhillon wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption here being that the integration of the now disused product into the parent product (Mailbox into Dropbox) has no potential to reveal the internal workings of the parent product e.g. APIs or data structures. Or that those techniques would only be applicable to competitors in that market . Both are convenient for your argument, but there's no reason to think that they're correct. Moreover, there's no rea…

> My point was to challenge open source cheerleaders to actually give a reason beyond their own gain for why a company should do this. Instead, we have blithe dismissals and narrowly constructed hypotheticals built on optimistic assumptions. I'm sorry, but what? Your whole initial argument is a narrow hypothetical "they will see our secrets" with no theory of what those secrets might actually be - what exactly do you…

Yeah, the difference is that the "narrow hypothetical" is a concern a real person at any company would have when tasked with deciding whether something should be open sourced. It's appropriately conservative.

You, however, are asking everyone to assume that it's totally safe to reveal any/all source code.

> There are no private APIs nor secret data structures in software that you've distributed to users.

That's fine. What about the code that lives on your servers and supports the client?

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#420

Post by nl » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 4:22 PM UTC

_urga wrote: post #403

nl wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

"Stock is a very cheap way for a company to acquire another." Not exactly. Could be the other way round too. It depends on whether the stock of the company is worth more or less than cash in the long run.

Yes.

Except since it is the company issuing stock in itself you can't really think of it as fungible. If it ends up being worth more than the strike price then literally one of the events that led to that price was the purchase stock being issued. Of course that doesn't mean the is a causal link, but in a very real sense the stock was free for the company itself.

The only cost to the company is opportunity cost.