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Minbox - a faster workflow for sending files

minbox.com

21–30 of 39 posts

Re: Minbox - a faster workflow for sending files

#21
post #2

Funny video and interesting app, although it's kind of misleading. It doesn't actually send files faster, you still have to wait the full upload time. What it does do is allow you to forget about the upload... it will automatically send once it's ready. Good job overall, I might get it when it's available on windows.

Thanks zombio. But it actually DOES send faster. 2x faster than Dropbox and Google Drive...

Re: Minbox - a faster workflow for sending files

#24
post #2

Funny video and interesting app, although it's kind of misleading. It doesn't actually send files faster, you still have to wait the full upload time. What it does do is allow you to forget about the upload... it will automatically send once it's ready. Good job overall, I might get it when it's available on windows.

Thanks zombio. But it actually DOES send faster. 2x faster than Dropbox and Google Drive...

Do you have the numbers to back that up?

Your page mentions uploads to S3 - do you do regional matching with appropriate region buckets? I've seen numbers that are sub 1Mbps when you hit the wrong S3 region yet I can reliably hit 900Kbps - 1.2Mbps, if not faster at times, with Dropbox.

Can you provide some average upload speeds you've seen? (Even from a non-residential connection is fine.)

Also - you state unlimited size, but even multipart upload to S3 claims a 5 TB max object size limit. Did you work around that somehow?

Re: Minbox - a faster workflow for sending files

#25
What if you actually want to send someone RAW files, or big videos? Can they access them, or do they only get compressed/resized ones? Seems like a shame to go to all this effort to make a fast service, then force users to obfuscate their stuff by putting it in a tarball or something.

Re: Minbox - a faster workflow for sending files

#26
post #16
post #14

The video is probably gonna be offputting for some people but it's hilarious. I actually laughed out loud at it.

While I understand it technically I feel like the video is incredibly misleading. It's demonstrating time-to-share a link which (at some point) will contain a file. It's not demonstrating time-to-upload a file like the video suggests by comparing directly against dropbox.

Incredibly misleading? Obviously it doesn't give you 8Gbit internet, it just saves your precious time. You don't have to spend five minutes on a task. It's not like Bruce was going to download that file as soon as he got the message, and that's assuming it sent right away, which it could avoid by delaying the email by those same 5 minutes.

In terms of workflow, it's a huge improvement.

Re: Minbox - a faster workflow for sending files

#27
post #11

I had an idea a while back to make an SMTP server that would automatically strip out attachments, dump them on a web server, and re-write the email with a link to the attachments. I would still love to see something that does this type of thing automatically (such as through an Outlook plugin or SMTP relay) so you can use don't have to change your workflow to get the benefit.

This has been something that I've looked at a few times over the years. There have been a number of FLOSS and commercial projects that have tried to do this (and all that I'm aware of have sputtered out). A defunct product called "Mailonator" (http://web.archive.org/web/20080611060558/http://www.mailona...) did exactly what you're talking about.

Re: Minbox - a faster workflow for sending files

#30
I think the video needs to be clear what the difference in the service is. It's not that you can't send a dropbox link till it's ready (you can, the recipient just can't see it yet). The feature here is that Minbox sends the email when the file is ready, on its own. Which is awesome, but not what the video is showing. That bit is the last feature listed on the page.
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