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Dropbox is shutting down Carousel and Mailbox in 2016

Dropbox acquired Mailbox first in 2013 as the cloud storage provider began growing out its mobile portfolio.

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Long standing email app, Mailbox, is shutting its doors come February 2016. Dropbox released multiple letters to users that explained the situation, with each of them stressing the need for a streamlined, convenient experience for users moving forward.

It’s with heavy hearts that we let you know we’ll be shutting down Mailbox on February 26, 2016.

Dropbox will cease operations on its standalone app Carousel and its email app Mailbox early next year.

Facing growing competitive pressures, Dropbox has dumped two of its flagship products: email service Dropbox and photo-sharing service Carousel.

“With both, we aspired to extend the simplicity of Dropbox to other parts of our users’ lives”, wrote Houston and Ferdowsi.

Paper is promised to become available to all Dropbox users within the next year, but Dropbox Business users can either apply for invites on their own or speak with respective IT managers. Again, it’s a strategy that larger rivals Google, Apple, and Microsoft have all espoused, with deep cloud storage hooks built into their respective products.

Dropbox says that since it made those moves, customers have shown they prefer to use just one app rather than multiple services. It seems Dropbox is now abandoning that path, and focusing on “collaboration” instead.

Carousel was introduced to easily manage photos online.

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Dropbox says it considered open-sourcing Mailbox, but ultimately decided against it. The full FAQ for Mailbox users is here. “We’ll be taking key features from Carousel back to the place where your photos live – in the Dropbox app. We’ll also be using what we’ve learned from Mailbox to build new ways to communicate and collaborate on Dropbox”.

Mailbox-done