Dropbox Ventures into the Email Management Space

Last week, Dropbox broadened the reach of its business, extending it from cloud file sharing and synchronisation to email. This has been made possible through the acquisition of Mailbox, an iOS mobile app which is able to manage emails on iPhones and iPads.

The co-founders of Dropbox, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowski, commented on the reason behind the acquisition stating, “Like many of you, when we discovered Mailbox we fell in love—it was simple, delightful, and beautifully engineered. Many have promised to help us with our overflowing inboxes, but the Mailbox team actually delivered.”

Orchestra is a small software house that is better known for its Orchestra To-Do which is an app for managing tasks. Mailbox was created by Orchestra and unveiled on Apple’s App Store around a month ago; it is gradually rolling it out to users, and so far has 1.3 million reservations, processing 60 million emails a day.

Orchestra has noted that it has greater goals, stating that in addition to developing more features and cutting down the service, “[its] goal is to put Mailbox in the hands of everyone who wants it. That means supporting additional email providers and mobile devices.”

Dropbox has been described by Orchestra as a “profoundly talented bunch who build great tools that make work frictionless,” further commenting on the fact that Mailbox would work very well with the company.

Additionally, Mailbox has addressed that Dropbox is capable of handling the large volume that may be created, and also has adequate security to support its latest endeavour.

Orchestra wrote: “Rather than grow Mailbox on our own, we’ve decided to join forces with Dropbox and build it out together. To be clear, Mailbox is not going away. The product needs to grow fast, and we believe that joining Dropbox is the best way to make that happen.”

At present, PCs, Apple iOS, Google Android and Windows phone all provide the Dropbox service through apps. (CY) Link