Dropbox to shut down Mailbox, Carousel apps

Mailbox, the app for managing email on iOS launched in February 2013 and bought over by Dropbox in December 2013, is shutting down. Dropbox announced that it will be closing down Mailbox, an app it bought for $100 million along with the Carousel app. Carousel was the photo, video gallery app launched by Dropbox.

When Mailbox was first launched in February 2013, it has an invite system and over 800,000 people had been waiting to sign up. The idea with Mailbox was to fix email and introduce ‘zero email’, which still remains a distant dream for many of us. Mailbox introduced the ability to snooze emails, plus quick swipe gestures to archive, delete messages on the go.

Dropbox’s team wrote on their blog, “Building new products is about learning as much as it’s about making. It’s also about tough choices. Over the past few months, we’ve increased our team’s focus on collaboration and simplifying the way people work together. In light of that, we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Carousel and Mailbox.”

The Mailbox team in separate post wrote that they’ve realised, “there’s only so much an email app can do to fundamentally fix email. 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.”

Mailbox has created guides and export tools to help transition to other mail clients. The app will shut down by February 26, 2016.