Is it trendy to buy people's favourite mail apps and kill them, or what?

What a shame. Mailbox really hit the sweet spot for me when it was working.

All these new email products are the same. They all follow the exact same approach and do not provide anything fresh or new to this method of communication. Simply providing a better UI is not going to be enough and these types of product will continue to die.

great acquisition.

I feel it sad when awesome startups that solve actual problems join a large company to end working on products only management seems to care about.

Can't say I'm surprised. If it's any help, here's my setup so far:

iOS – Spark is an awesome replacement and owned by readdle so it should have some staying power for a bit. This app is easily my favorite iOS mail app since Mailbox, and I've tried a few.

Mac – AirMail seems to be fairly solid. Been using it for a couple of years now without any real complaints. Pretty fast dev updates as well.

Biggest thing for me when looking at a client is their support for other accounts besides gmail and icloud. Both of the above support any account including IMAP accounts.

Dropbox also bought Readmill and killed it. I hate these guys now...but if the acquired company accept it, then everyone is to blame. Or no one... The vanity of the startup world :p

Sad news. Which is the best alternative to Mailbox?

Very sad to hear this, especially considering this from only three months ago: https://www.designernews.co/comments/168610

Mailbox for mac has been such a disappointment for me, plus I got tired waiting for it to come out of beta after 3+ years. Inbox by Google works great for now and seriously, has anyone heard of Slack?

I remember being on the initial waiting list when Mailbox was announced, it was definitely a game changer when it finally released.

Im scrambling now to find a replacement thats also a universal iOS app, I use Spark on my phone but only for my work account. Any suggestions on apps that have a iPad app as well?

I've been very happy with cloudmagic for many years now.

just a shame there's no desktop client for it.

womp womp

Next: Carousel

I'm confused about this tweet. What does "abandon" mean? Was the product sunsetted? Or is a dedicated team simply not working on it anymore? Will the service be shut down? The Mailbox website doesn't give any indication.

If Mailbox doesn't fit in with the overall Dropbox product strategy, then it makes sense they'd pull resources from it. There is a lot of overhead required to simply maintain a product, let alone iterate and improve on it. But that doesn't mean they killed it. Maybe there was a dedicated Mailbox team that got pulled into other projects with higher priority and when Mailbox requires attention, they can address it ad hoc.

This was so obviously going to happen from the start, you'd have to be covering your eyes and have your fingers in your ears not to see this coming as soon as they bought it.

If email is dead, why are so many people upset about this? :)

On the bright side, you got an extra 1GB for free if you linked Mailbox with Dropbox.

Very upsetting.

Mailbox is the only app I've found that works on all the platforms I use - Mac, iOS AND Android.

Disappointing, and unsurprising.

This sucks. Really not looking forward to trying to find a new app. The mailbox workflow was perfect—snooze and lists are all most people need to stay organized.

Can anyone recommend a good replacement on Mac and/or iOS? Everything else looks pretty overfeatured.

Edit: Idea. Maybe this is because Dropbox has the team working on a Gmail alternative? They have their own version of google docs now, so it seems plausible.

Good example of not being able to patent interaction design.

See also: Any indie Weather/Calendar app.

Thought this was the case, it's been dead for what, at least a year?

Happy now using Postbox on desktop and Outlook on iOS. They're not going anywhere anytime soon.