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Dropbox shutting down popular Mailbox email client and Carousel photo app

Mailbox done

In a new blog post today, Dropbox has announced the shuttering of the Mailbox app it acquired in 2013, along with the Carousel photos app that launched last year. The beta build of Mailbox for Mac has not seen an update in quite some time, while the iOS version had been left to stagnate, leading many to believe this was the case already, but today’s announcement finally confirms it.

Dropbox says that the reason for the shutdowns was that company had “increased our team’s focus on collaboration and simplifying the way people work together.”

The Mailbox team released a separate blog post in which the developers conceded that “there’s only so much an email app can do to fundamentally fix email,” and noted that many of the new advancements in email management Mailbox had made were now available in other apps.

On a FAQ page, the Mailbox crew confirmed that the shutdown will take place on February 26 next year. Prior to that shutdown, users will be given an option to export their auto-swipe patterns to help recreate them elsewhere. Snoozed emails will be available in the “later” list.

On the 26th, all drafts, auto-swipe settings, and snoozes will be deleted. Messages falling into those categories should remain on users’ Gmail and iCloud accounts without any problem.

All user data will be deleted from Dropbox’s servers within the next 30 days. Users who earned 1 GB of free Dropbox space by signing up for Mailbox will not lose that extra storage. Mailbox has also confirmed it has no plans to open-source the app.

The teams previously working on these projects have been shuffled around inside Dropbox. Those who had been working on Carousel will see their work integrated directly into the main Dropbox app, while the Mailbox team will work on collaborative features in Dropbox Paper.

So proud of my son and his upcoming Mailbox app.

A photo posted by Eddy Cue (@eddycue) on

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Comments

  1. crichton007 - 8 years ago

    Makes me really happy I opted to use iCloud Photos rather than Carousel when I was evaluating my photo storage options a few months back.

    • bpmajesty - 8 years ago

      Ditto!

    • mzaur8 - 8 years ago

      What does this have to do with Carousel? Dropbox is not going anywhere..

      • mzaur8 - 8 years ago

        Hmm no way to edit/delete comments? Nice. Anyway, I didn’t see that Carousel was also being d/c’d

      • crichton007 - 8 years ago

        True but it does point to a lack of a long term strategy and I’m looking for a long term solution. Even Dropbox’s statement indicates that they believe there are a good number of users who will prefer to move their photos to another service because of this change.

  2. applegetridofsimandjack - 8 years ago

    Mailbox was never a success because it didn’t even support Exchange and all those other mail clients.

    • Chloe Mccoy - 8 years ago

      So far, the next best thing to me is myMail. It supports Exchange and all other services

  3. srgmac - 8 years ago

    Unibrow!

  4. 311sie - 8 years ago

    Bummer, I really liked this app. Back to airmail then.

  5. Michael (@mikeloughran) - 8 years ago

    in other words, dropbox will just copy box’s strategy

  6. freediverx - 8 years ago

    Never trust a company with any product that is not the core of their business.

  7. standardpull - 8 years ago

    I left Mailbox after Dropbox acquired it and its privacy policy became ridiculous. Evidently enough many other customers figured that out too.

    “Free” isn’t “free” when something takes your valuable rights away.

  8. Benjamin (@NSbenjamins) - 8 years ago

    truth be told, Mailbox is not that popular.

    • Zac Hall - 8 years ago

      small but faithful following?

      • Zac Hall - 8 years ago

        compare the reaction online to that of Carousel going away and I think you can argue that it was popular

  9. rentalanimal - 8 years ago

    Lets try to get it to go open-source! http://chn.ge/1TwEFYU

  10. totencough - 8 years ago

    Wait, Eddie Cue’s son started Mailbox? Well, he did a great job until they stopped development on it.

    Luckily Polymail looks like it might swoop in just in time to save the day and bring more to the table.

  11. 311sie - 8 years ago

    Blown away to find out that Eddy Cue is Ian Gallager’s dad.

  12. It’s too bad, as I was once a huge fan of Mailbox. It didn’t try to do *too* much, but adding seemless snooze functionality to e-mail was brilliant. Sadly the Mac app, as Mike’s article notes, never left beta, and it never really worked right. And development on even the iOS app seemed to drop off rather quickly after its acquisition by Dropbox—leading me to wonder what Dropbox ever saw in it to begin with. (If they had merely wanted the team or some IP, I would have understood, but they (on paper, at least) kept it going as Mailbox for quite some time.) I’ve already moved on to Spark thanks to Dropbox’s lack of development, but I’m sorry to hear of Mailbox’s (official) demise!

  13. Mailbox for iOS would periodically reset itself and lose all my settings, including all my mail. It “only” happened twice but that was enough to make me switch away.

  14. zBrain (@joeregular) - 8 years ago

    so what do we do now? go back to apple mail?

  15. j0hnf23 - 8 years ago

    is this really eddy cues son?

  16. Oflife - 8 years ago

    I knew Carousel would be dropped. Soon as Dropbox introduced it, I got put off and stopped using DropBox, as I saw them moving away from their core competency, namely, a backup hard drive in the sky, that left content in it’s original form, unlike (say) Google Photos, and that the user was free to use as they wish. To be frank, no one has cracked the perfect all in one content archiving and sharing service. I thought Google had with Drive and Photos, but they compress your images and video so they are not suitable for archiving. In other words, pointless. Pity as the integration between their properties, such as Docs and Photos is nice. Oh well, Utopia will have to wait until another day…

  17. Johan Aberg - 8 years ago

    Loved Mailbox. Just posted an obituary from a fan perspective. Snooze in peace Mailbox! https://blog.briteback.com/mailbox-snooze-in-peace-an-obituary-by-a-fan/