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). The VC-backed "winners" will all get aqui-hired, and then the acquirers will be unhappy because what they bought wasn't actually good enough for prime time.
Here are just a handful of the reasons:
- It is deceptively hard. Like airfare pricing, most people think it's a couple weekends of work, when in fact it's at least 5 years and millions of lines of code to get to a real MVP that someone could use instead of Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail, etc... The set of abstractions required to do it right are unobvious and nontrivial, and you end up with unfixable problems if you don't get them all right. We've rewritten Inky essentially from scratch twice, and only in the current version 3 (circa October 2015) do we finally have the abstractions correct. Look at the Thunderbird bugzilla logs and you will find thousands of bug entries, many of which go on for pages and pages. ITA was similar, by the way: 1996-2001 was basically iteration to get to an MVP.
And because it's not just hard, but deceptively hard, founders and their teams systematically underestimate the effort required, which leads to all kinds of failure modes. Even in the success stores like Mailbox, the teams basically punt on a number of hard problems that really are required for an MVP (like properly sanitizing HTML, supporting Exchange and IMAP "for real", proper support for all the weirdly encoded mail you see in the wild, encrypted mail via S/MIME, etc.)
- The other entities you have to work with are a complete nightmare, and as the client app everything appears to be your fault. Google, Apple, Yahoo, etc. just do whatever the hell they want, randomly, have broken servers they never fix, and place arbitrary problematic restrictions on clients: all limit clients to a small number of connections, and Apple won't let an email app run in the background, so you can't support "real" push notifications without keeping the user's credentials unencrypted in the cloud (which I refuse to do). Google, out of the blue, started banning clients that didn't use oAuth, sending users scary messages about unsafe software. oAuth is great, but just breaking everyone who doesn't support it yet is really, really nasty.
- VCs absolutely hate the space. Email startups have been dogs forever, and every name-brand VC has been burned on a crappy email investment.
- Consumers simply don't care about usability, privacy, or anything else enough to not use what comes with their phones.
- Security-conscious people who might pay for something that's genuinely secure never believe anything is genuinely secure in practice unless it's open source... in which case there is no business model.
- Existing mainstream clients are ironically sticky, because once users develop coping strategies to deal with the quirks of the client they're forced to use, they never want to invest the effort into learning the quirks of a new client.
So why do I work on it? Because in my opinion it's a really important problem that affects billions of people -- and one that needs to be solved properly by folks who are doing it not just as a data harvesting operation, loss-leader to sell devices, or as a way to build a moat around a core offering (search).
> 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 :)
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?
Maybe, but not any time soon. S/MIME solves the same problem and is what enterprises and governments want. It's incredibly complicated and difficult to implement properly, but it does include solutions to some security-related issues that PGP doesn't (e.g., security labeling).
In 1996 there was a huge need for airfare search. Look at the success you've had.
On the contrary email in 2015 isn't a huge need or a pain point for most people.
Since you're entering a crowded market your product has to be 10X better. Currently it's probably not which is why most people perceive Inky as a marginal improvement.
Still I'd love to see other projects you're working on Dave. Clearly you're talented and with the right idea I could see you getting back to where ITA & Crash was.
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 every user's account set up on their servers to process push notifications. Did that ever change? If not that's a non trivial expense/complication to scaling, especially when you're up against an OS-integrated app that doesn't have those restrictions.
That's because making a big pile of money the Silicon Valley way requires two things: a product, and a moat. It's not hard to create an email product, but email moats are hard because it's an anarchist technology by design.
Warren Buffet talks about "moats" all the time. Basically a business with a moat is just a business with a defensible advantage.
If you think of your business as a castle, a moat is something that stops others from taking your castle from you. This could be anything from a network effect (Facebook, LinkedIn), economies of scale (Amazon, Walmart), to patents (most biotech companies) to brand (Coke).
The way he put it was something like, "If you gave me 100 billion dollars to take Coke's market, I can't. They've been investing in infrastructure and brand all over the world for decades. Even if I could make a better tasting beverage, people would still buy Coke. They have a moat".
A moat is a competitive advantage that's hard for competitors reproduce or otherwise overcome. Coke's moat is its near universal brand awareness and affinity. Comcast's moat is its infrastructure and political clout. Crossing a moat in any conventional way is very resource intensive and often leaves the challenger vulnerable.
I thought the business proposition of Mailbox and Carousel was providing more utility/centralization around Dropbox services/storage (via file attachments and photo storage). Which never was a great idea, but still.
That's exactly my point. Silicon Valley rewards "go big or go bust", it doesn't reward "small, sustainable business".
I don't for a second blame the founders of Mailbox for doing what they did. When the market creates a strong set of incentives like this you can't really expect anyone to do anything other than take the $100m. But this is the side-effect.
VC is generally designed for big bets and big payoffs (invest in 10 risky bets in the hope that 1 pays off to cover your losses on the other 9). Less risky ventures with smaller payoffs take longer to grow, and don't satisfy the payoff requirements of the VC model.
That doesn't mean they're bad companies, but there's definitely a funding gap for the type of company that will require $3M in investment up front and be worth $10M in 5 years. That's still a great return, but right now it's the domain of private equity.
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 get some proven and experienced employees, which may be worth it given the unreliability of the standard hiring process
Care to guess who this deal is not good for?
Startups are (and are being heavily marketed as) a get-rich-quick scheme. Most of the people involved are self-selected to follow this process. And all this talk about providing value to the users? That's the part of the scheme where you get used.
This may be a contrarian view, but: I'm not convinced it's good for the buying company. Good engineers are hard to find, but this is an awfully expensive way to hire; you may not keep the good people for very long; and if you're the kind of company that has a really hard time hiring good people, you may not also be very good at getting engagement and productivity out of the people you acquihired.
My view on acquihires is that to some extent it's a trick the acquiring company plays on itself. Some manager is getting to hire a few good people using money (the acquisitions budget) they wouldn't otherwise have access to.
Acquihires are more about hiring functioning teams composed of engineers and executives who are used to working with each other. That's a lot more expensive to build than just the salaries; and you can generally take that team and throw them at a problem with a reasonable expectation they'll accomplish something.
Also, there's generally some amount of IP and customer data involved as well.
"you can generally take that team and throw them at a problem with a reasonable expectation they'll accomplish something"
For about 6 months to a year, after which time most of them have left, or have gone into "waiting for the golden handcuffs to come off" zombie-worker mode on a project they have no inherent interest in.
Totally anecdotal but the couple of acquihires I've seen from the inside have gone like this and it seems to be the natural state of them based on what I've heard second-hand from others.
I agree with this based on the 20 or so people I've known to go through this process to join a large company (amazon, google, etc). I've heard first-hand accounts of people even re-negotiating deals just to get out of the golden handcuffs they thought they could tolerate but couldn't. I understand this sounds a bit hoaky and I would love to give names and companies here, but obviously can't.
Agreed; they tend not to be great deals for the acquiring companies long-term. But short term you can rally that team to build something else, and your likelihood of finding the mythical 10x developer (or manager) is statistically higher in a startup that successfully launched a product in a compressed time frame (even if the market didn't work out for them).
Any acquisition involves a lot of turnover. Guaranteed that this turnover is built into the models they use when evaluating acquihires. Consider how expensive most company's talent acquisition costs are though (upwards of $100k+ per candidate hired for top talent) and it starts to make sense.
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 a few times.
And many times, there's no other exit option for the VCs. Does it suck for users? Absolutely - which is why companies often have lots of apprehension about being early adopters of a startup's technology. It's why B2B startups are really hard, and why they tend not to hockey-stick because the customer acquisition costs are high and don't shrink with scale.
It's up to the founders to convince their VCs to pass on the acquihire because they think the company still has hockey-stick potential. Zuckerberg did this a number of times - it was still really arrogant, but it paid off for Facebook and shows why founders need a bit of arrogance to be successful. It's a lot harder to do this if you're running a startup that doesn't have a lot of market traction.
I think most VCs would rather see the company stick it out and go for the hockey-stick & IPO. An acquihire is a blip on their returns; it's basically worthless. They're usually arranged as a courtesy to founders, so that if you work your butt off for 3 years, do everything right, and still don't find success, you don't leave with hard feelings toward the other people you worked with.
You get acquihires when the assumptions behind the company's business model have been proven false and there's basically no way to solve it other than rebooting the company. Arguably this is an argument to not take VC until you've got the hockey-stick trajectory, so you can pivot & reboot at will without dissolving an existing organization. But even this sucks for customers, if you have any.
>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.
Another thing that should be mentioned is that most VC's have a close relationship with bigger tech companies. Its a way to move money out of the public markets and back into private. There are multiple implications with this type of behavior.
But this totally negates your point about "there isn't enough money in an email app". Clearly Dropbox thought there was at least a $100MM opportunity...either talent to produce $100MM+ in value, customers to convert into $100MM+ value, or staving off competition that would result in $100MM in potential loss.
> "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 underutilized by whatever they're doing right now.
So there isn't enough money in making email apps, but a team capable of producing a great email app can be put to use doing things that do make a lot of money - but it sure isn't making email apps.
And that's unfortunate, because as users we're missing out on a lot of great products. The dark side of the immense growth in software (and immense growth in software salaries) is that entire products and services are no longer economical, even though we'd all love to see them. The VC system that drives these early acquisitions and acquihires is just one more factor among many that limit the field of what can be economically produced.
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 dope, and their invite process was funny, that's all.
Looks like Dropbox fucked up, that's all, bad business decision, trying to copy Google and do better than them in the end they did the same.
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.
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.
"in a very real sense the stock was free for the company itself"
Stock always has value, especially to management.
Unless the company has poor self-esteem. :)
The reason so many technology companies today make acquisitions using stock is because they (correctly) understand their stock to be inflated, relative to intrinsic value. If that were not the case, if they understood their stock to be undervalued, then they would definitely not be giving it away in transactions. They would be making all-cash offers instead.
> " 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 dope"
But that's the key isn't it? I think you're looking at this from too narrow a point of view.
Yeah, email clients aren't worth much money, so its development isn't worth much either (when's the last time anyone you know paid for an email client?).
The point isn't to acquire a "developer of email clients" it's to acquire a "developer of top-of-class mobile apps", which is considerably valuable. Think of the average quality of a mobile app you use on your phone, the bar is pretty low. Producing truly amazing mobile apps (like you said, the UI was dope) is hard, and requires the flawless, cohesive operation of a lot of facets from engineering to UX design.
Truly excellent mobile teams are very rare, and worth a lot of money. To the tune of $7.6MM over 2 years? Beats me, but it doesn't seem completely out of the question.
Talented developers are worth a lot of money - teams of talented developers, designers, and product people who have a track record of producing stellar work together are worth a multiple of their individual values.
> " and honestly to write an Email client is not genius level shit."
It's not genius level shit, but it's a surprisingly rare skill, and by that I mean writing very, very good frontends. Most people here can write a functional email client if they had to, but how many of them can write a really fucking good one, so good and so easy to use that people - and not just the technorati - sing its praises from the rooftops and get their friends and family to download it?
The Mailbox team was operating at a level well above nearly all mobile app teams, and the quality of their work was easily an order of magnitude better than the industry norm of its time. This may not justify their acquisition price, but I think you're selling them short a bit. They're a team of people known for exceptional quality work, and command a high price for it.
I'm sure some of them are still there, however. They shutdown the product and put the team members to work elsewhere. So it could be prorated over a longer period depending on the acquisition deal.
Dropbox could have thought that and just been wrong. Even in the normal economy, per The Economist about half of all acquisitions destroy value. In our little hothouse, I'd expect a much larger percentage of value-destroying takeovers.
But there are plenty of other reasons deals get done than a company-wide coherent calculation of economic value. E.g., I've heard of acquisitions happening because a CEO needs to demonstrate to the board that they're doing something. Or incentive structures set up to reward an M&A team based on how many deals they do. Or executives wanting to bring in their old buddies from another company. Or, "gosh, money is so cheap right now we'd better spend it because our competitors are spending."
It's pretty clear that Dropbox valued Mailbox for its potential to be something other than the standalone email app it was. And you might be right - there might well be enough talent on the Mailbox team to produce $100M+ in value - but not making a standalone email app.
If we're being ultimately generous with Dropbox then what they are doing is exactly correct - taking a team that can create a $100M+ product and reassigning them somewhere that they can fulfill that potential. But that's of scant consolation to all the people that want to continue using the email app.
> 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).
Pegasus mail was pretty good, even if a bit enterprisy. I just searched and wow... it's still being developed! The website even still lists the msdos version. http://www.pmail.com/
I'm sorry, I apologise in advance, but this irks me.
"We now live in a world where people pitch tantrums about paying $10 for an app"
Where do users/customers get these expectations? Call it market forces, race to the bottom, whatever... do a little root cause and not blame joe public please.
Yup. I still don't see why everyone complains about current mail clients. Mail.app on OS X / iOS, Outlook on Windows, works for me.
To make me switch, you would have to show me why the new thing was so much better. Like how Google search results were always better than Yahoo! (IMHO, no objective measurements used) so I switched. You would also have to explain it in a sentence I could immediately understand, whereas all the recent clients I've ready about either (a) claim to make things better but don't tell/show me how before I get bored of the page, or (b) use manager speak that I can't understand or is vague and abstract promises to increase collaboration or something. Therefore I've given almost no attention to any recent attempt to change email.
There's a big distance between "works for me" and "delights me."
I use Thunderbird on Linux and Windows. It "works for me," in the sense that it's stable and predictable and doesn't lose my data. But it also has lots of niggly little problems that annoy me, like UI decisions that made more sense ten years ago than they do today and limited tools to support people like me who have a ton of mail.
So while I use and recommend Thunderbird, I also would love to see something come along that is so much better that it makes me fall in love with it, instead of just shrugging my shoulders and resigning myself to this being as good as things get.
How much are you looking to pay for this? How many people are looking for delight in their email client? Do these numbers multiplied add up to a few tens of millions?
"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."
Yeah, this is definitely what I saw with Sparrow. For it to become popular it has to be adopted by a substantial number of people. However, I find that only really tech savvy people cared about Sparrow and its streamlined interface. When I showed it to other people, they were reluctant to use anything else because they were afraid to move from their Apple Mail. I'm guessing if Sparrow had existed for windows it would've been the same thing with people using Outlook.
And then there's people who don't even use e-mail, who think it's outdated and prefer PM messaging as a form of communication. It's easy to see why a lot of these promising mail client apps don't really take off the way other apps and services do.
Nevertheless, Sparrow will always have a home in my Mac, as long as it keeps working on OS X.
Same. Sparrow is still my favorite email app on the Mac. Sadly had to give up on it with iOS as it just got super wonky. Will use it as long as it works on OSX.
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.
We've structured our business to... actually have a business. Our team spent the first year selling APIs to developers [1] which already power lots of paid apps. The N1 mail app we released two months ago[2] follows this and will have paid features next year.
Plus both are open source free software, and quite popular on GitHub. [3]
Can you compare yourself to Mailpile? I want an email client (and maybe server) that is privacy-conscious and easy to configure. Are you two completely different projects?
I understand what Mailpile is. It's a self-hosted email web client.
What is Nylas? The website doesn't seem to be written for me, but for PHBs. Apparently you have great business, design, and APIs, but what is it that those things do? Are you an email client? A server? A webmail service?
What makes you different from Gmail or from Mailpile?
This is the first I've heard of N1. It looks appealing, but after following the links and looking at it on GitHub, it seems like installing the sync server for self hosting is still non-trivial.
I went to the "releases" tab on GitHub and it looks like the last one was in 2014. I see things in the GitHub repo that suggest there are Dockerfiles and Debian packages, but I don't see an actual Debian package repository or an entry on the Docker Hub. Is the recommended way to use it today just cloning the git repo? Or is there a stable release of the sync server that's tested/known to work with the binaries of the client?
Yep, just clone the git repo and set up on Debian (like Ubuntu 12.04) and run setup.sh. Most developers run it in a VM.
We don't have "releases" because we are constantly releasing to production. Check out the `production` branch on GitHub for what we're running right now. Usually it's just a handful of hours behind master (at most).
@softawre: He's asking for it to delete on the receivers side too.
I think certain enterprise-y email solutions have this, but there's no way to have that happen in the distributed email ecosystem unless all your messages were just links to a website that could delete the content centrally, or similarly, jpg's of rendered text that were somehow forced to be remotely fetched each time.
And, indeed, that sort of functionality runs counter to the idea that once something has been sent to me, it's "mine" to keep/delete/whatever without someone else having the ability to change or delete it without my permission.
in order to do that, you can send an unique link as content so you can have total control over what you sent. doubt that many would click but i couldn't think of any other way.
other than that, i don't think receivers like the idea that others can control what's in their inbox.
Slack is a corporate product that sells subscriptions to their native-only service. An e-mail client that only let you see your last 30 days of e-mail without paying for it likely wouldn't catch on because people have different expectations for how e-mail should work/openness than they do with a corporate communications platform.
Side effect of this is that Mailbox was the first to support out of the box notifications on my Apple Watch + gmail accounts. Apple mail doesn't monitor/push emails from Gmail so you don't get notified on the watch.
Also, it's not 'disruptive' which isn't very sexy. At the same time, no one's really disrupted email (probably since gmail) and even sms for the most part, as a form of communication because they are the only cross platform with a very low barrier to entry. Note that all the sms replacement apps still use sms as a fall back since it's a shit show of walled garden apps.
I'm starting to believe that any idea of "disrupting" communications via a private company should be culled in its infancy. Market can't do infrastructure. Most companies will do their utmost to lock you in, and then abandon the product as soon as it's even marginally more profitable to do something else. Doubly so with Internet startups, for which the barrier to exit is incredibly low.
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 spend all our waking hours improving it since it's our baby and we love it to death. We've been beta testing the private current release with a lot of Hacker News users and I think we're fast approaching something really awesome!
Feel free to email me at vu0tran@gmail.com for a beta invite and would LOVE to hear your suggestions of what you'd like to see in an email client!!
Yup. Acquired for $101M then subsequently shut down in 1-2 years (just kidding of course).
I don't know if it's in my best interest to answer this publicly, but screw it. The honest answer is I'm not entirely too sure, but an acquisition is always on the table for any startup IMO. I think whenever you ask a founder, "If someone offered you $100M, would you take it?", it's a pretty loaded question.
There's really three outcomes to a startup: They die, they get acquired, they IPO. The thing is, if you think your company is valued at $1M and someone offers you $100M, of course you're most likely going to take it. It's 100x what you were expecting and it would be unwise not to take it. However, if you deep down believe that your company is worth more or can be worth more than the offering price and you have the proof to back it up, then it'd be unwise to take the offer.
For me, I strongly believe that email has A LOT to go. I mean, it's nearly 2016 and I still can't connect my Dropbox to my Gmail app client or send stuff into Evernote / Trello? Given all the time we spend on email, shouldn't we at least have some better automation / AI integration by now? Something smarter and more contextually aware that can make my life a bit easier?
So many people use email in the world. Literally everyone that has a Facebook account has to have an email account. I think the reason why we haven't seen a billion dollar plus company yet is that it's very ubiquitous and it's hard to build solutions for the masses. So companies give up, sell out, close down, and then we have to start again at ground zero.
So to your question, what's the end goal? Well, if we're right about our beliefs, hopefully we can become the next billion dollar company. If not, then it's the other two options: get acquired or die. Which one will it be? No idea, but we're just working our butts off right now.
> There's really three outcomes to a startup: They die, they get acquired, they IPO.
There's a fourth: they serve the needs of their customers over the course of years and decades. which, as someone in the market for an email client I can fall in love with and use for the rest of my life; is exactly what I want.
It's interesting that this option wasn't even considered.
Why does every startup need to aim to take over the world overnight? Is it not feasible to first take external funding to grow quickly in early stages, and then transition to a more organic growth model once you reach a point of profitability and sustainability (and maybe also slowly buy back shares in the company to eventually become fully autonomous)?
If that was an option, he wouldn't be in YC, half-accidentally or otherwise. Nothing against YC here, but long-term steady-state isn't what they're looking for. Remember that next time you start using a VC-funded tool.
Again, how was that not an option? Why did he have to get into YC? What's wrong with telling them that the type of unsustainable growth isn't right for their business now that they've had a chance to look at things?
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.
Those are really the only three outcomes for a venture-backed startup
Once you raise venture capital, you have to go big or go home, in the span of a decade. You don't have the "grow slow and stay private" option after raising a Series A.
That being said, this is just the current, common state in VC-backed companies. With the weak IPO market and hostile public environment that forces short-term quarterly thinking, we may see alternatives like formalized secondary markets. Perhaps companies like Uber will be able to avoid going public and still provide liquidity options for their early investors & employees.
> Yup. Acquired for $101M then subsequently shut down in 1-2 years (just kidding of course).
> hopefully we can become the next billion dollar company. If not, then it's the other two options: get acquired or die.
No offense, but it doesn't really sound like you were kidding. I have no skin in this game because I never used Mailbox and am content to continue using GMail, but if I was upset about this shutdown and in the market for a new email client that would be around long-term, your answer wouldn't exactly inspire confidence. You've basically said you're going to shut down (or get acquired and then, inevitably shut down) unless you hit the lottery ticket of a billion dollar company.
Speaking more generally, I think this sort of attitude is going to catch up with VC-backed startups sooner or later. Why would I make my workflow depend on a startup that is, in all likelihood, going to either shut down or get acquired and shut down? For anything with a high switching cost, using a product from a VC-backed startup that has this outlook is just going to cause me problems later if I get dependent on it.
I think a lot of companies would do better by their customers (and themselves) if they instead looked for a more sustainable business model. But there isn't as much of a lottery ticket in those businesses, so I can see why some founders avoid it.
"So to your question, what's the end goal? Well, if we're right about our beliefs, hopefully we can become the next billion dollar company. If not, then it's the other two options: get acquired or die."
What's wrong with just having a nice business that just makes some money?
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?
Nitpick: "If you delete the application from your phone, your data is gone for good" is the worst possible way to phrase what is otherwise an excellent feature :-)
vu0tran, I'm almost sold. It looks great, and I love the private part (which was the one thing I could barely live with in Mailbox).
If you do snooze[1], I'll throw all my money at you :)
[1]: which of course either requires server side (e.g. Mailbox) or (preferably) client side logic. I'd be fine with the latter, but I agree it's a non-trivial problem.
Webmail is way too ubiquitous for desktop email software to be worth the million dollars a year it costs to hire five bay-area software developers to build and maintain it. I imagine Dropbox would have kept it around if it saw more user traction, but it didn't.
Inbox by GMail has some of the ideas from the Sparrow team incorporated in it, but it's only really usable on mobile. (The desktop Inbox web app is awfully slow compared to, say, GMail or Outlook.com.)
When Hotmail came out, who still paid for Eudora licenses?
That said, if a decent email client is that important to you, don't underestimate the impact you could have building it yourself as open source on evenings and weekends. And if you don't think it's worth your time to do that much, why would you expect anyone else to?
HotMaiL didn't make a dent in Eudora market share. What killed Eudora was Outlook Express, bundled with the operating system for free. Incidentally, the same strategy was used against Netscape (who then proceeded to quickly kill itself when faced with that prospect).
> And if you don't think it's worth your time to do that much, why would you expect anyone else to?
I don't expect anyone else to build me a FOSS email client. I do expect that by 2015 somebody would have figured out a way for me to give them money for a good email experience. :)
I did expect that by 2015 somebody would have figured out a way to make a decent kettle that lasts a lifetime, or a similarly decent fridge, or washing machine, or even a watch. Sadly, I was disappointed.
If you own something, you're not buying it - so the seller doesn't get the money. Software figured this out quickly - that's why everything that has not moved to cloud yet is being sold in form of licenses - a temporary grant to use some software. Rest of the world did it with planned obsolescence, and now the trend is to actually make you license hardware instead of buying it. It's sick. But that's where the money is, that's what the Market[0] says to do, therefore it's happening.
There's a difference - software also has unplanned obsolescence. For instance, I've been working on a non-profit website that has a fair amount of QuickTime video from way back when that was a good choice. If you don't do something about it, it won't play anymore on modern browsers. It's hard to align the interests of software developers with the interests of customers using a one-time purchase, but with work that continues indefinitely. Appliances are different since I don't need their features to change long after the sale. In this case, if they can charge me more at the time of the sale for an appliance that lasts longer, we can align interests.
- Open Mail, roughly time how long it takes from left pane click to message fully rendered on the right (~2-3 seconds)
- Open Dropbox (fast before it goes away!) and do the same (~250ms)
I get roughly 100-150 emails overnight that I go through in the morning. At 2-3 seconds PER THREAD render this is insanely unproductive use of my time.
Every time I open OSX Mail I have this exact process in my head and I promptly close it.
Not sure what's happening with your setup. For me it's nearly instant. Some long long threads or heavy HTML can be up to about 800ms.
I'm also talking about my iOS experience. There are some perf issues that would be nice, but for me that's mostly in search and initial sync than stuff that's already downloaded.
FFS, just hand the product over to the community. Or have someone manage the project (security/features/quality) and accept patches from the community. Or use ANY of the revenue to hire someone outside the aqui-hire part-time to work on it.
It's such a shitty, disrespectful, dangerous pattern to buy and shutdown products. The community knows it and bemoans it every time. Blogs have been set up just to highlight how shitty it is. Countless words written about how shitty it is. This isn't like giving away free cookies and then stopping, it's like standing someone up on a date.
"—and we’re sorry. It’s not easy to say goodbye to products we all love..." but it's just business move, and business only leverages emotions and feelings when it's profitable for us.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Multiple accounts. I have multiple work accounts (several companies) and a personal one. Having each open in tabs/window would be too much. I use Apple's mail apps on Mac and iOS, with a single unified inbox.
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, etc).
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.
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.
Is the email stored on your servers ? Do we get contacts and calendars inside the app as well ? If yes, on which email providers/account types ? Why isn't this info on the website ? Thanks.
For intra-corporate mail, email works just great, because the identity problem is solved. Trusted communications between 3rd parties just isn't a natural mail use case.
Spam, in the I'm getting random Viagra emails sense, is being handle very well lately.
That said... We have a very large industry that easily helps you get your "ham" (the mail in-between Spam and mail you really want to receive) inboxed.
This is email from legit companies. Maybe you signed up to a newsletter, maybe you didn't. Maybe you're just getting a cold email. But those emails are inboxed.
People are still complaining about being overwhelmed by their email, even though our Spam filters have improved greatly.
You need to consider what is more valuable, the ability to universally send arbitrary content to arbitrary end points without intermediaries .... Or no spam, and perfect security.
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 than all email clients -- but it's the one that if all parties involved quit, I could probably use it for another 10-ish years.
For example - offlineimap right now still has this old bug where sometime it uses all my cpu (and a bunch of memory) in some sync case. Ok, I don't have time to debug this. I set limits and have it be killed when that state occurs. Annoying? Sure. Have to configure whole new mail client? Nope!
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).
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
> I still bounce around email clients every couple months
Between two-factor authentication, application specific passwords and the notification center, configuring a new mail client can be a lot of work to have to redo every couple months. I did this for years before finally settling on the default clients for both iOS and OS X, and I've noticed a lot of my coworkers have done the same.
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 (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 "delay for later" feature is tremendously useful compared to traditional inbox handling.
Of course, to trust that feature, it also has to be tremendously reliable, and that's the biggest thing that Mailbox got right in the first place. That's also why it very handily beat out Mail Pilot, which had the same idea and got started earlier but to this day is still filled with terrible bugs.
I'm not the parent but Outlook's IMAP support is quirky at best and I very strongly prefer native applications to web applications. I also host my own email which marks gmail right out.
Email should be simple but there has been essentially no lasting innovation in email clients in a very long time unless you really want Google to host it for you
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 former email startup Acompli with a fresh skin although obviously it's probably not getting shut down anytime too soon) doesn't have very good message searching for Gmail, which is a common complaint I have for non-Google mail apps. Obviously, I get that Google has a huge built-in advantage here; but if your email app is going to support the "Mailbox paradigm" of abandoning folders/traditional labels in favor of just marking things as done, it also needs to have search functionality that can back it up. Outlook was also really buggy for me when I last tried it, although that was a little while ago so it may have improved.
The new Outlook app is actually surprisingly good. I think the Sunrise guys (sunrise.am) are running that team and it shows. I laughed the first 2 times friends recommended me the app, but I tried it and now also highly recommend it.
My favorite tiny detail is that I can tune the notifications to push only unread counts to the icon badge and only for the "focused" inbox. That means I can avoid constant push notices for email yet still be able to glance down when I want to and see if I have any unread emails that are actual human communications.
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.
Just curious, how is processing hundreds of emails in Mailbox or Inbox better than Outlook? Seems like trying to do that on a mobile device would be hard no matter what app.
Airmail is quite good, and AFAIK you can turn off some of its many features. http://airmailapp.com/ (hint: You can use it for free if you use the beta version)
I was a huge fan of Sparrow (like you, I used it long after the updates stopped), then Airmail and Mailbox, but now I simply use the Gmail web app. I follow the zero inbox method strictly, so I only need to read/archive/reply/search emails, and it does a decent job at it (except for search where it's best in class), while being simple and non-confusing.
I was, but hadn't bought a license before the acquisition, so that part of things got a bit annoying. IIRC there are ads that take up a good amount of space.
FWIIW, Inbox has been created by the Sparrow team (among other googlers oc), so at least it is not a case where an acquihire ends with the people working on completely unrelated things.
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 the new version is now an OS X native application as opposed to a webview.
- Frantic releases over the following weeks, killing some bugs but introducing more.
- Stagnation in releases, in its fairly broken state.
- This announcement.
From the outside, it looks like a case of an engineering team that decided it would rewrite the application from scratch in the native stack. Widely regarded as a bad idea. [1]
After numerous months spent burning money in refactoring and rebuilding features that already existed and worked, management pressure builds up, and they decide to release their "good enough" native version. After torturous weeks of back to back frantic releases to fix all of the complaints coming in, some factor or another (developer churn possibly) caused them to cease development and decide to sack the project altogether.
This is of course just speculation, a narrative I made up. That's how it looks like from the outside to me, but I'd like to hear from the developers inside, since I know they must be reading this thread.
I loved this application and I'm saddened to have to move away from it.
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.
The reason I thought the previous version was a webview was due to the not-really-native-looking settings pane (Cmd+,), which turned into a much more typical looking one post-update.
Thank you so much for the input, and thanks for helping build something I enjoyed using.
Glad I'm not the only one who thought the one supposed 'major' update did not add very many useful features and made the UI look cluttered. Also, it ran surprisingly well for a webview app, I don't see why they felt the need to rewrite it.
I just don't think they had the numbers on Carousel, and maybe not enough growth in Mailbox either. If they were getting users like mad, of course Dropbox would focus its attention on expanding them.
Even if they wanted to open source their system, it is likely is that they migrated their codebase to the Dropbox platform, and it would be difficult for them extricate their code. Most larger tech company (e.g., Google, Facebook, MSFT) have this problem when they want to open source products...
God forbid anyone make any money. Where I work we feed our engineers on the appreciation of free users. That's the only way to fly. Self-entitled much?
God forbid anyone share abandoned code. Where I work we incinerate anything potentially useful when we're done with it. That way no dirty freeloaders can take advantage of it.
Let Pa be the probability that some piece of your open-sourced codebase reveals an important technique or strategy to your competitor, thus leveling a technological advantage you have,
Let Ca be the cost of that lost advantage,
Let Cb be the value of good will from the open source community
It's an email app. It talks IMAP^H^H^H^Hto Gmail. It runs on iOS. How many secret, commercially important techniques do you really suppose it contains?
Suppose it writes to Dropbox using internal APIs? How many developer hours should they spend abstracting/obscuring that usage? What are they going to gain by doing that? What are they risking if that process misses something?
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 is easy to underestimate, and that to convince someone to do something you have to appeal to their incentives/concerns rather than your ideals -- the entire argument in favor of opening this app is built on pedantry and baseless assumptions.
> 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 that at all. (This is also why you must always sanitize data coming in from a user's device, even if it's from your own app.)
You can make the argument that there would be a time cost cleaning up the internal calls that will no longer work once the servers are turned off. Sure, but: 1) there are no secrets that would give competitors a new advantage, and 2) if you don't have that time, just chuck the code over the fence and see what happens - worst is that no one uses it, which will be the case with closed code anyway.
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.
Someone said consumer apps (Carousel and Mailbox in this case) couldn't be open-sourced because they use "internal" APIs.
My point was just that any API over HTTP that's used by a consumer app is not private or internal. It is a public API with unfriendly documentation.
(Note that when I say "unfriendly documentation," I'm not even talking about sniffing. Most consumer apps can be decompiled by non-experts, and then the text-based API calls would be readable.)
That "formula" really isn't particularly difficult to work around.
First off, if you're open sourcing your codebase because you're getting out of a particular market, you have to ask whether revealing techniques and strategies to competitors in that market is really an issue. After all, if those techniques and strategies had given you a competitive advantage, you probably wouldn't be having this discussion.
Second: If you really are concerned about that, just use the GPL.
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 reason for a risk adverse company to accept those assumptions.
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.
> 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 expect in return? I gave you an answer based on your formula, and a follow-up comment afterward. Can you expand what about my answer was built on optimistic assumptions, in a way that your initial theory was not?
There are no private APIs nor secret data structures in software that you've distributed to users. It can all be decompiled and sniffed. "Oh but the competitors will see my code" is basically FUD. How many times has YC told us it's all about the execution, not the technology?
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?
That's hardly a reason to not open-source. You're not required to provide support just because you release your source code. Even a dump of their repositories would be useful for people who are interested in Mailbox.
No; but often the server components are heavily tied to some other proprietary libraries that they're not ready to open source. They could remove all proprietary code from their codebase, but that costs money - likely more than they were willing to spend on this product.
Unless open source is part of your marketing strategy (which means the effort would have a budget), it's really difficult to open source an existing commercial application.
That's a speculation on your part.. and PR spin-off on theirs.
Nobody asked them to support it, or whatever. Just dump the damn thing online so others can pick up and continue to "help fight your inbox to zero".
Clearly their intention here was profits and since they didn't see any - they kill it off. They won't do it so nobody else should try to safe email either.
I wanted to get my company (over 3,000 users) off DropBox long time ago after each update comes with new issues. But this just broke camel's back. I will make the switch happen this weekend.
> Clearly their intention here was profits and since they didn't see any - they kill it off. They won't do it so nobody else should try to safe email either.
Um, of course their intentions were profit? Dropbox is a for-profit company, nobody ever questioned their intentions as being anything else.
And it's not pure speculation; I've worked on enough internally-developed products to know it's not always feasible to open source an entire service offering after the fact. It's expensive enough to do between code scrubbing, legal reviews, etc. that you're generally only going to do it for strategic reasons (i.e. you know you can never make money doing it but want to commoditize the market space to hamper a competitor's growth, you want the community to help support your infrastructure, or your business model is open source + support).
At the same time, if they do open source it, people are going to see that it was once Dropbox, and any issues they see with it are going to be seen as the fault of Dropbox.
"Just dump the damn thing online"
Far more work than it sounds like.
"Clearly their intention here was profits"
They are a company with bills to pay and engineers to pay, right?
"They won't do it so nobody else should try to safe email either."
I don't see them going around and killing other people's email clients.
Honestly most startup backend systems are not amazingly engineered or something to be proud of, so I would guess that the code would need some considerable work before releasing it to the public if that is what they chose to do. Even after release, the project would need considerable support to get it off the ground (helping the first users, accepting contributions, establishing the project community and leadership). Simply dumping the code on Github with no instructions and leaving it to rot is not particularly useful.
This is very sad news and I don't really get the decision.
The thing with Mailbox is that it was truly a great product before it switched hands to Dropbox. Once they bought it, that was the end of good functions and the product only went downhill from there.
There's a lot of potential with email clients that will help you work better, Mailbox was definitely one of those products that helped. With good clients for Mac and PC along with smartphones it would also be profitable IMHO.
The only thing I can think of is that Dropbox is headed for major firing rounds and they want to save up on resources.
I have switched to Airmail on my Mac and I am much happier now.
Dropbox is obviously planning to go a different direction with its core product strategy, so that makes sense to me, but those products were too good to just let die. I'm sure someone would be willing to take them off of Dropbox's hands.
That would be the rational thing to do. I don't believe it will happen though. If it was going to happen it would before they announced they're shutting it down.
I just don't get how you can spend 100m$ on something and just let it die.
What did Dropbox get out of this deal?
So you're saying that Mailbox was a great product for the whole month between when it launched and Dropbox acquired it?
I can tell you that behind the scenes it was far from a well architected service, and the only reason why it was able to ditch the signup waitlist and ultimately handle the needs of its userbase was entirely due to the Dropbox acquisition.
What I am saying is that Mailbox was a great product, yes.
Looking at it from the outside, it seemed that Dropbox initially just continued the initial product velocity that existed from before the purchase.
After a while it seemed that the development lost steam, features were lagging and it seemed that they lost interest.
I am sure it wasn't a very well architected service and beyond that growth was "controlled" by the invite system (which ironically only fueled the growth).
The Dropbox acquisition had a lot of potential, mainly in fueling the growth by adding people/servers and ops knowledge.
So yeah, they ditched the invite system and a lot more people were using the product but what's that worth if the end decision is to drop the product all together?
What I'm failing to understand here (and I will admit it's due to non-existent investment knowledge) is what did Dropbox get out of the 100mm paid on the product and what led the decision to drop it now.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't think Mailbox was derailed by Dropbox, since it barely had a public life before Dropbox and certainly would not have survived without the acquisition, Dropbox is equally as responsible for the few good years as the original Mailbox team.
As far as what Dropbox got out of the acquisition: no idea. I know there was a lot of interest in the Mailbox team, and they were immediately given a much broader purview post-acquisition (much like the founding team of Cove when they got acquired). Ultimately I don't really think that parachuting in founders to take over parts of your company works -- three out of the four of those people no longer work for Dropbox, for instance. However, at the time Dropbox clearly craved adult supervision, and I think that was seen as the way to get it.
Oh, and if you have a product people like, that doesn't hurt either. I just found it maddening that Mailbox was built from day one not to make money, and that problem was never solved. That sort of thing can only last for so long.
I thought Carousel looked really cool, eagerly installed it on release.
Then I discovered that when Carousel is installed, the Dropbox app stops automatically uploading photos from your phone. You have to now open Carousel to do so. Broke my existing upload process, and due to iOS permissions for the new app or not launching it frequently or something the new Carousel upload process wasn't reliable.
Discovered this by noticing that weeks of pictures weren't backed up to Dropbox. Glad I didn't lose my phone.
Ended up just deleting the Carousel app rather than figuring it out. The Dropbox app started syncing reliably again.
Sounds like you had a bad experience. I enjoyed the app until recently switching to amazon primes unlimited photo uploads. The amazon photo app has a very similar feature set compared to Carousel, but seemingly worse performance on large collections.
On iOS at least, apps can't run in the background. Carousel could only upload photos when you open it (or, as a workaround, when your GPS location changes if you've given that permission).
Carousel's "Flashback -- Discover This Day in the Past Year" feature strikes me as a very clever social workaround since it gets you to open the app at least once a week.
The Dropbox iOS app has the same limitation. Presumably you opened it more to do unrelated tasks, so it makes a lot of sense to bundle them.
Google Photos has the same limitation as well on iOS. I find Carousel's syncing and Google Photos' syncing seem to be roughly on par with each other.
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.
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.
He means the Outlook iOS/Android app, which was a 3rd party app Microsoft bought (Accompli) and further upgraded by the people at Sunrise Calendar (also bought out) to make the app that it is today. Outlook for OSX, though, is still the classic Microsoft Office for OSX app, so it doesn't have any of those upgrades. The iOS app is my daily driver, and it works splendidly.
>nothing else I know of has message snoozing. ANY suggestions welcomed.
The new Outlook mobile apps support scheduling for later. I don't think it's as nice as Mailbox was (with multiple choices for when to schedule) but it's the closest thing I know of.
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.
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 by stupidity.
Is this Dropbox cleaning up their balance sheet in an attempt to IPO?
There's a pretty loud rumor floating around, heck it was reported on CNBC today, that Dropbox can't come close to IPOing anywhere near its $10 Billion dollar valuation. Though Fidelity did mark them up slightly at the end of November!
And for better or worse, they are going to be closely compared to Box, which has been a pretty big disaster since IPOing. For the record, BOX is valued at 1.65 Billion currently. And it has an awful lot of short interest current( a measure of the ratio of shares sold short vs the total outstanding shares).
On the other hand, I thought Dropbox was squashing Box like a bug in terms of users. Not sure if that translates to revenue though. Wouldn't investors want the most profitable company to IPO?
This is the reason why I stick to the native mail on iOS or Gmail app for the emails i need instantly without fetch. Yeah they may have their cons, but I don't have to worry about Apple dropping Mail app.
Mail should be simple, I think the best apps are the lightweight ones that don't require too much work to keep alive, and definitely don't require a backend server process.
Also, Mailbox had access to all your mail, and when Dropbox bought it while having M̶r̶s̶Miss.Rice on the board of directors, well...that just felt yucky.
My simple solution to keeping my mail under control:
ONE filter on the Gmail side of things, called "Good Spam". Any reoccurring email I like, but don't want to keep manually archiving everyday, SKIPS inbox and goes into that folder. The filter is literally a huge list of email addresses from senders. (ex snippet "....events@eventful.com mail@e.groupon.com radioshack@em.radioshack.com Hewlett-Packard@us.newsgram.hp.com....")
Anytime I get an email I don't consider "Good Spam" I unsubscribe from.
Then on my phone, I just get important or new mail.
BONUS from using filter instead of unsubscribing:
When you are in that store and you need that BANANA REPUBLIC coupon at the register, you still have access to it. Open email app, search for it, and use it. And you don't need to keep looking at their emails everyday just to archive it. Or in case of Mailbox, swiping right....thumbs get tired too.
What I've started doing is to filter via whether or not they're in my contacts. I have a folder (I don't use Gmail) where all non-contact-originating email goes into. That folder doesn't even ring up the new email count.
I've immensely enjoyed this new system. I, like you, immediately unsubscribe from things that I don't even care about in the "good-spam" box. Only I am too lazy (or don't care enough) to maintain a huge list of email addresses to filter out. I'd rather err on the side of too much filtering (e.g. not in my contacts) since I still get it on my phone/desktop. If I ever want something to hit me right away, I just add it to my contacts, even if it's a company/"good-spam" address.
Nice. White list approach as oppose to black list. Makes sense. I would probably end up still using a filter though, because I don't want to have so many contacts for people I barely contact.
Indeed, I had finally taken the plunge on Carousel for its killer feature: Freeing up space on my 16GB iPhone while having the photos instantly available if I needed them. Carousel was a breath of fresh air; it had no issues with backing up photos over WiFi or cellular data, unlike the main Dropbox app. Now it's back to the unreliable and slow Dropbox app for photo syncing.
While I too dislike when stuff I use is shutdown, there's another possible way to look at this. Maybe the product lived a much longer life than it would have otherwise, had the original creators abandoned it after failing to make sufficient money on it directly.
Are these really even products if they have no plans or even really options for monetization? Mailbox was a free app with no ads and no freemium features. It was doomed from the start. Although Kudos to the founders there that were able to turn a good idea, a great marketing strategy, and a couple months of work from a small team into an immediate 9 figure exit. Those founders knew what they were doing.
Users beware: just ignore startups altogether. A hot startup is a vehicle for converting user growth into money for the founders and investors. It does not exist to create and maintain a good product. It's fine to tag along for a ride; it's not good to make yourself dependent on its continued existence.
I think you can almost stop that at the word acquired. I loved pre-acquisition FolderShare. After Microsoft bought them, FolderShare was mashed into a bunch of aborted projects that sucked.
Wasn't Sunrise renamed Outlook on iOS? I have Outlook on my iPhone and it looks the same as the screenshot in the below discontinuation announcement...
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 defer an email to a particular time, or adding it to a to-do list.
It's mainly intended at people who get too much email.
I use Outlook. The thing I like about it is that it integrates my gmail and icloud accounts nicely. Native iOS app doesn't work well with GMail because you won't get notifications for new mail. And the GMail app doesn't work well with my icloud.com email - or iCloud doesn't forward to GMail reliably.
So I use the MS Outlook app and both are integrated seamlessly.
I didn't use Mailbox, but I think one of the key features is the snooze button, that makes an email disappear from your inbox and then reappear later. I think at the time Mailbox came out Google didn't offer that feature. The GMail webapp still doesn't have it but now Google Inbox does.
For those disppointed with Mailbox's abandonment, I'd love to hear your feedback on Polymail (https://polymail.io). We're in private Alpha right now, but we have many similar features to Mailbox like Read Later + some better ones like Email Tracking & Send Later. Feel free to DM me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/foolywk) if you'd like to be added to our next Alpha release!
It says only "coming soon on OS X". Does that mean it is an OS X desktop app only? (I currently use Mailbox on Android, and am very interested in finding a replacement, but could only care less about OS X if paid to do so).
I'm not really sure how we are supposed to give feedback to a closed alpha test, but many people here are discussing the business viability of native email clients, so maybe you can talk about the market and what the business prospects are when entering this market.
There's definitely a large subset of the market which expect not to pay for an email client, but there are many email products available now with many paying customers e.g. yesware, streak, sidekick, etc. There are certainly ways of capturing revenue from the email marketing, but I think that Mailbox was too focused particularly on the entire 'Inbox Zero' aspect of the product and never expanded much beyond that.
That's abrupt. It wasn't that long ago I was bribed into downloading Mailbox by some notification in the Dropbox app.
Bummer too, because I really like it. They're not even going to leave it and let it slowly decay until time takes it's toll and nature wins like with Sparrow.
"As you evaluate alternatives, you might consider the stock apps like iOS Mail (Apple) and Gmail (Android)"
I guess they didn't have much time to research other mail clients.
I've been a Dropbox user for--I don't know how long. A long time. I would say since...maybe 2009?
I do not know what those products are for sure. By their names I'm guessing something with photos and something with email. I feel like an old evangelist like myself would have known more about those products. Thus, I wonder if this was a marketing failure as much as a product-market-fit failure.
Likewise, I've had Dropbox since around 2009 or 2010, never even heard of Mailbox until now. I actively avoided Carousel solely because of how much the mobile Dropbox app was trying to push it on me, my reaction was more-or-less "What? I'm not changing my workflow." and ignored it. Might have been a shame, but it didn't feel welcoming with how they tried to do that...
A while back Dropbox said that they had grander ambitions that being a single-product (Dropbox the service) company, rather they wanted to be a sort of Microsoft, Lotus or Borland of the current generation.
This statement preceded the acquisition of Carousel (a sort of alternative to iPhoto and Picasa built on Dropbox [the service]) Mailbox (an alternative email client, no technical connection to Dropbox [the service]).
So yeah maybe this strategy isn’t panning out? I dunno, just irritated that the default move for abandonware isn’t open-sourcing it.
I haven't used Mailbox, but I'm glad to see Carousel being rolled back into the main Dropbox app. It's already good for photos, and didn't warrant a separate app.
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.
Snooze functionality became my most important feature after using Mailbox. I switched to Outlook several months ago because it supports snoozing and archiving with the same swipe gestures, and it allows me to add all of the mail accounts Mailbox didn't support. The UX isn't quite as polished as Mailbox's, but that's improving regularly.
Maybe Inbox from Google? That's all I can think of at the moment. I am as sad as you are. I felt like I had absolute control over my email with no messages in the inbox and being able to snooze messages to check later.
I was a die-hard Sparrow user when that was killed. I've been using Inbox now since it came out, and it mostly fits the bill. I wish there was a desktop app like Sparrow, but the browser UI is decent. I still have to open gmail occasionally to make filters, but that's all.
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.
I switched back to Airmail on OS X last week as it was pretty obvious Mailbox was dead as there were 2 critical bugs regarding switch and images not loading that hadn't been fixed in months. It's a shame but that's life.
I have to manually setup the rules/filters for now but reading through some other clients in the app store they seem to be buggy. I used Airmail years ago before Mailbox and it was stable and has been since switching back.
I went from Sparrow to Mailbox to Airmail. Sparrow was the best for its time. Mailbox had potential but was riddled with bugs. Airmail doesn't have the cleanest interface nor all the coolest features, but it's the best option I've found at the moment. For iOS I am still using Mailbox, but I guess now I have to use something else, will probably give the Gmail client a go.
One OSX client I've just found that I'm hoping does what I need: https://nylas.com/N1 It's open source.
Agreed! It had great functionality, including customizabiltit and the best approach to separating wheat from chaff I've seen to date. Spark is entirely client side (Though they're hinting at adding server-side features; as long as it doesn't include server-side access to my email no problem).
Mac client slated for early 2016. They support plain IMAP (yes!) and even Exchange.
"In 2013, we acquired Mailbox ... In 2014, we launched Carousel ... Mailbox will be shut down on February 26th, 2016, and Carousel will be shut down on March 31st, 2016."
Someone should track the lifespan of cloud products. It's not long; the median is probably less than five years. Dependence on a cloud product is risky. They can go away so fast.
Not surprised at all, there hasn't been any updates or improvements in awhile, especially for the desktop app, it's nearly unuseable with its current bugs. Seemed like Dropbox never put enough resources into it for it to really get off the ground.
I've switched to airmail for the time being, but I'm definitely going to miss snoozing emails to specific dates.
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.
They will focus on Paper... until they decide to axe that, too , when they see they can't compete with Google. I think the axe-happy mentality sends the wrong signals when considering products. I'm not gonna use Paper, really, I'm gonna phase off Dropbox as well. I'm not happy they killed Carousel. It was a small simple product - maybe they need a couple of developers to keep it going. It doesn't have to be fancy. I just worked and worked well.
They will focus on Paper... until they decide to axe that, too , when they see they can't compete with Google.
And that will be even worse... Carousel used photos that were stored in Dropbox. Mailbox used an existing mailbox. As far as I could see Paper data is just locked up in their cloud and can only be exported as PDF.
No thanks.
All these acquisitions and axed products have made one thing clear to me: I want plain-old files that I can download. Preferably in some open standard.
Yeah, I completely agree. Carousel is one of my favorite apps because of how unobtrusive and simple it is. It makes me feel like they're not going to commit to anything of theirs if I use it. Fortunately, the nature of the service makes it trivial to migrate away.
Well, compared to Mailbox and Paper, Carousel is simple. Dropbox is not as simple as Carousel itself. There are much more complex apps developed by single developers than Carousel, for example, and many are not even developed for profit. There's very little investment that Dropbox has to do to keep Carousel running, but they decided not to and compromise a lot more than they expect!
Cool products coming and going doesn't really even surprise me anymore. I've become a little jaded to the whole come and go of all the different tools and apps.
Anyway, if you guys haven't checked out Boxer [1] for email, it's the best. I went a little obsessive, tested every email client on iOS, and this one was without a doubt is my favorite:
* Push notifications
* Doesn't hijack labels with archive/to-do/completed nonsense
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.
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.
I've always been puzzled at the two acquisitions. I know it's easier to say this in hindsight but there are a few reflections many had upon hearing the initial acquisition of those tools:
* So you've acquired a Gmail client - why? Surely whatever good comes out of that Google would just re-create into Gmail. Sure enough: Inbox. I'm not even sure how this would have fitted into the Dropbox strategy? I doubt they would have wanted to be acquired by Gooogle. I doubt they would have wanted to compete in the email space... If it was just to get attachments from email surely there are many other ways to solve this problem.
* Second thought: Dropbox has acquired a photo sharing and organization app. Surely they don't think they will win over Facebook, iPhoto, Flickr... What for? Store the photos? Even if it's an awesome product, don't they just risk Apple Photos getting better? Or wait... Here comes Google Photos.
Inbox. Google Photos. iPhotos. Facebook Moments. It feels like both Mailbox and Carosel were just ticking timebombs.
> We’ve come to believe that the best way for us to improve people’s productivity going forward is to streamline the workflows that generate so much email in the first place.
I don't know if I understand what Dropbox is anymore. It's gone from: syncing file storage --> a decentralized app ecosystem that in some ways competes with PaaS (effectively an OS [1]) --> document and media collaboration tools.
They might be one of the only companies whose products compete with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon...
Just to clarify, I think they've done all of these things well.
What are the chances that these go down the path of HackPad and be turned into open source projects? I think it's a win-win situation if companies, such as Google and now Dropbox: let go of the responsibility of maintaining it and allow the project to live on in the hands of the community.
Good idea. I was bummed out when Google Wave was cancelled, then happy when I found out how easy it was to run the derivative Apache Wave on my own server, then bummed again when friends and family did not want to use my Apache Wave instance because of the limited network effect (i.e, not enough people were using it).
Awesome. Hey, start-up type peoples. Good luck getting me to use any of your nifty new software. Cause every time I do, and invest my time, data, and learning in you, you sell out then disappear.
There's fool me twice thing in here, but I'm not that inspired to be clever with it.
"But as we deepened our focus on collaboration, we realized there’s only so much an email app can do to fundamentally fix email."
We beg to differ. We built a new email client around the very idea that it could fix team collaboration: https://missiveapp.com
The thing is… with Sparrow, Mailbox and countless others before, it is getting really hard for a team like us to convince people to invest their time into our new product. People are increasingly worried that we will just fold/sell in the coming months and that their time will be lost.
Establishing credibility in the email space is hard and takes time, there is no shortcut, announcements like this one doesn't help us.
It is no surprise, when one-product companies do other products they don't last for long.
Only reason why I still use Dropbox is their client for Mac and and simple web interface and some other small features. I don't understand why nobody else is able to do it...
I don't understand why nobody else is able to do it...
Because they don't care, need to, or want to? Google and Microsoft are competing with Dropbox on economics of scale and perhaps as a loss-leader. A lot of people are willing to forgo peer to peer LAN sync or block-level syncing when the cost is much lower. Additionally, both Google Drive and OneDrive have an integrated office suite, which adds value for a lot of people.
Moreover, if you can get away with a weak client, it's an advantage. Someone who has all their data synced to disk can easily switch. Someone who has their data primarily in someone's cloud cannot as easily.
Network file systems are hard. There are 30+ years of posts in various places of the Internet, hundreds of books, and dozens of implementations' source listings that you can read.
Dropbox have exceptional engineering talent, and a mature code base. Nobody else before or since, has ever come even close to what they have, quality- or feature-wise.
That they make it look easy doesn't mean that it is easy. It's like saying, all this guy ever does is hitting the puck in the net skating backwards, I don't understand why nobody else is able to do it?
They're killing the apps I actually use from them. Carousel was quite useful for all of the photos I've uploaded, and handles uploading the photos pretty well too.
This is finally giving me the opportunity to explore using some of the other cloud storage such as Google Drive or even iCloud where I can save some money each month as well.
Yes. They are shooting themselves into the feet. Too bad I pay annually! They won't be able to realize I left them until next year! I even got one extra year from Dell's Black Friday. Urgh!
Well, if you are worried about cancelled apps and platforms, Google Photos is probably not a good bet. They went from Picasa to Google+ Photos to Google Photos. In every transition, features were lost that people relied on...
But can I sort my unread emails by ascending date? If I'm practicing inbox-zero, I don't want to fight my email client to review my oldest (unread) emails first.
It seems to sort with the newest at the top. The app is free so try it out. It took a little getting used to after having used Mailbox for so long, but it unquestionably better.
I don't know about desktop. I just use my phone/ipad for 90% of my email, so that works fine by me.
As for being hired, Readdle makes a ton of ios apps, and are profitable in their own right. Also, while Spark is free, some of the features they've hinted to as coming in the future will likely be in-app purchases / upgrades, that will allow it to be profitable as well.
I've been using carousel and have switched a lot of family members to it. I was using Snapjoy before (which Dropbox acquired and killed), and had done the same thing.
I find the announcement about Carousel extremely disappointing. I'm definitely going to think twice about using Dropbox for anything other than simple file storage in the future.
Pictures are peoples' lives, their families, and their memories. This is a big part of file storage and I thought Carousel was a superb product on desktop and mobile.
Sorry to vent but I haven't been this disappointed about a product being killed (for no apparent reason) in a long time.
This is one of the reasons I just accept the flaws with iCloud Photos and go with it. My other family members can use it easily enough and I don't have to worry about it going away.
Perhaps I'm wearing rose-colored glasses as a non-gmailer, but I think in the end everyone is served better by more difficult types of innovation. I look forward to seeing what Paper turns out to be.
If you want a zero inbox client, then InBox on top of gmail is pretty good.
I use FastMail as my primary email, and I don't quite do zero inbox. I probably have on average 5 to 8 emails in my inbox, and a few stick around for days.
It takes some effort and overhead but I am trying to move away from email as being a "memory box" for organizing my life. Instead I am using subject organized markdown files stored in encrypted cloud storage where I maintain tasks, research notes, etc. since these are synced on my laptops, I can search them with spotlight, cortana, etc.
Combined with FastMail, this scheme keeps me organized. As easy as using InBox for email and TODOs? No, but so far it is working for me.
Spark is great for this; it supports IMAP very well. You can customize the UI for archive, trash, snooze and pin swipes to your liking. And unlike Mailbox, does not rely on server side access to your email or email account.
We're a group of folks interested in solving this problem - perhaps by building a stable self-funded business around the most widely requested email client features, or perhaps by driving an open source movement in the community. Maybe both. Help us help you.
This is a huge blow, this was the mail app I used exclusively on the phone. What's the best alternative? Inbox? It seemed a bit complex when I first tried it out.
I would have guessed Mailbox could have been sold instead of shuttered. Maybe MAU has slid lately, but I thought they had a lot of happy users.
On the other hand, it's amusing to note the Valley inflation that has happened since Mailbox was acquired in early 2013. It was for ~$100M which seems like chump change in the Age of The Unicorn that we now find ourselves in.
It always feels awkward when reading such a note, seeing that it gets a lot of upvotes and never heard about any of these products before. What was mailbox? Like many other people I'm pretty unhappy with the mailbox choices I have nowadays. In fact, I have to use four(!) mailbox programs to handle everything I need. Pain in the trashcan, I tell ya.
That is very sad. Carousel was a essential part of my photo editing and backup workflow. Maybe need to investigate switching back to drive. The problem with them was though that photos backed up with "Google Photos" didn't appear inside drive and vice-versa. Did they fix that by now?
Mailbox never worked fine for me and had bugs in every corner.
I don't know much about Mailbox, but I was an enthusiastic Carousel user . . . until Google released Photos. With Google Drive integration (both up and down), way better search, easy sharing (without requiring a recipient Google account), and photo editing, I dropped Carousel like a rock. I suspect I wasn't the only one.
Makes you wonder why they even bought them in the first place. There was no possible integration there, the only move was expansion into other markets.
So buy them, wait two years, then kill them off? Great use of funds there Dropbox, I guess you put the stellar bunch in charge of the development roadmap in charge of acquisitions too.
Despite all the bugs and the short-falls of the Mac app update, it had the best snooze feature that I've come to live by in my email workflow. It looks like Polymail is an evolved Mailbox (with a eerily similar design/features) and Nylas N1 has a lot of potential as well.
I loved Mailbox. Really disappointing. What do folks suggest we use as our replacement email app? Problem with Apple's stock Mail app is that Google doesn't allow push email. Yes, those few seconds before I receive an email are very precious to me :)
Mailbox helped me get control of an otherwise unmanageable email problem. Brad Feld recently recommended outlook. Which is funny because an old version of outlook was the thing that created my email monster & subsequent search for a better email client.
That's really bad news for me. I've used Mailbox everyday for a long time, before it joined Dropbox. I am really happy with it, and never tried to switch to another mail client.
Part of me is really mad, the iOS app works well and does the work.
Part of me is liberated, the OSX app is buggy as hell and drives me nuts every day.
At least in case of mailbox, I would say they were sherlocked by Google Inbox: nearly as good an UI but without the need to share access to email with a third party.
I really never liked that aspect of mailbox and I thus never used it with my primary mailbox, which meant that I practically haven't used it at all.
The moment Inbox came out for google apps, I started using it to the point where it is now my primary means for accessing my mail.
