

Yahoo! Mail Partners With Dropbox To Add File Attachments - hoov
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/02/yahoos-resurging-mail-product-gets-a-boost-from-dropbox-partnership-to-make-managing-attachments-easier/

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goronbjorn
> This is good news for both companies, specifically Dropbox. This brings an
> all new audience to the service, which has become a mainstay in the
> workplace. The company has yet to crack the consumer area

That's completely backwards. Dropbox started as a consumer tool and is now
creeping into the workplace.

~~~
DenisM
Says who?

I don't know a single person who uses dropbox for personal stuff, but I know
tons of businesses in the furniture industry that use it all the time. For
them it's only second to ftp. So it's my anecdote against yours, showing
opposite things.

~~~
untog
I think it's pretty widely accepted that Dropbox is used for personal stuff a
lot. I know at least a dozen people who use it, including people who don't
work anywhere near tech.

In fact, remote storing of business data is a huge red flag for a lot of
people, so many businesses do not use the service.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Indie filmmaking lives on Dropbox. It's hard to remember getting along without
it.

~~~
BrianEatWorld
Do you have any more detail on this statement? I can completely see it, but I
am really intrigued on how it might be used in practice.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Filmmaking, and particularly indie filmmaking, is a very distributed
operation, in terms of assigning work and often in geographical terms as well.

You may or may not have an office for the project, you may or may not have a
base of operations. You'll have dozens of people who need to coordinate
frequently (constantly, really), though. And Dropbox is a major help.

Scripts, schedules, budgets, art, paperwork (reams and reams of paperwork),
call sheets, gear lists, location scout photos, maps, breakdowns of 100
different sorts, VFX tests, various collections of footage (though production
footage tends to be large enough to warrant sneakernet), etc etc.

I sometimes do coodinator work of various sorts on low-budget movies, music
videos, etc. Dropbox made very quick inroads into that world. Even if the
production doesn't have one for the whole project (and they should),
departments will often set up their own. Particularly art departments, with
their 50-bajillion details to track.

I've got a couple of film projects I'm developing with partners, and we use
Dropbox from very early in the process. Scripts, storyboards, concept art,
etc. One of our partners is in Portland, and another in New Zealand, but
Dropbox keeps us all on the same page (along with Skype and Gmail, of course).

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jwwest
> Yahoo! Mail is still the #3 most used mail service in the world with Hotmail
> and Gmail in front of it.

I'd love to see numbers of how many people ACTIVELY use these services and not
just total email addresses. Many, many people I know of use Yahoo and Hotmail
for spam traps, or set an email address there up long ago and then long ago
abandoned it.

Claiming "most used mail service" is either very misleading, or sloppy
writing.

~~~
untog
I think this is one of those tech bubble things- everyone we know uses Gmail.
But outside of tech circles a great many people still use Hotmail and Yahoo
mail. Like my parents.

At least they're not using AOL.

~~~
dear
So true! People should stop treating their own little circle as representative
of the world.

------
colinsidoti
Cool. Dropbox seems to be pushing hard to become the goto for email
attachments. If Mailbox doesn't win, they'll still have market share with
Yahoo.

Mostly surprised Yahoo would do this - I can't imagine we'll be seeing a
similar deal with Gmail/Outlook.

~~~
mayank
Gmail already integrates with Google Drive. This is a cheap way for Yahoo to
replicate that functionality.

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loceng
They are playing catchup to competitors, and they are diluting their own
profits / sharing them with others - which is fine, though I hope they realize
this. And I hope they have a very solid agreement with Dropbox.

Google so far will still win in the overall big ecosystem. You just can't
compete with the synergy and safety of one organization fully controlling /
having full management capabilities over all of the pieces.

~~~
mindcrime
_You just can't compete with the synergy and safety of one organization fully
controlling / having full management capabilities over all of the pieces._

You mean the single-point-of-failure of having all of your eggs in one basket,
and one company completely in control of every piece of your life. You're
right, how could anybody compete against that? :-)

~~~
psbp
You don't have to be locked into the ecosystem though. It's just more
convenient to have everything in one place.

~~~
mindcrime
Yeah, that's the rub, isn't it? We (humans) are always so quick to make trade-
offs that might not be in our best long-term interest, in order to gain some
near-term convenience.

I'm certainly guilty of this myself: I use most of Google's services, for both
personal use and I use a paid Google Apps account for my startup's email /
etc. And I use an Android phone. Maybe it's time to start re-evaluating some
of this stuff... Hmm...

~~~
psbp
How is it a trade-off? Is Google giving me cancer?

~~~
mindcrime
_How is it a trade-off?_

Because it's a single-point-of-failure, and because you're giving one company
a disproportionate degree of control over your data.

~~~
psbp
Is the implication that allowing them to collect my data will adversely affect
me? Why would I continue to use their services if that were to happen?

~~~
mindcrime
There are a lot of ways that it could be bad/dangerous, but the most obvious
is: What if Google's (in)famous automated algorithms some-day flag your
account as spam or malicious in some regard, and they lock you out of
everything? This has happened to people before, and some of them only got the
situation corrected because they thought to post here on HN, where their story
caught the eye of a helpful GOOG employee who happens to post here. But what
about the non-HN crowd? After all, Google are notorious for having essentially
zero customer service if you aren't a paying user of one of their various paid
offerings. And even then I'm not sure how good their service is (I pay for
Google Apps, but have never had to engage with their support in any way).

------
shanelja
Is there really any need for this?

Maybe I'm a little traditional but last time I checked Microsoft handled this
just fine on their own, is Yahoo Mail really in such a bad place that they
need to outsource their file attachment hosting?

When I'm using outlook, I click on a file once and it downloads, simple as
that, I don't want to have to screw around signing up for yet another service
just to use it.

I don't really care how amazing Dropbox may be, if I have to screw around
accessing another service instead of just clicking "download attachment" then
the user experience is already ruined for me.

~~~
pyre

      | is Yahoo Mail really in such a bad place that
      | they need to outsource their file attachment
      | hosting?
    

I imagine that Yahoo! Mail is similar to Gmail in that there are size limits
on the emails that you can send. Your email _with attachments_ can't be over
20 ~ 25Mb on Gmail. I think that Hotmail's limit is around 10MB. Partnering
with Dropbox would allow one to use their Dropbox space for much larger files.

    
    
      | When I'm using outlook, I click on a file once
      | and it downloads, simple as that, I don't want
      | to have to screw around signing up for yet another
      | service just to use it.
    

Dropbox allows you to share files publicly, IIRC. They could take this a
couple of ways:

\- When attaching, the user could be presented with a dialog that allows them
to select files already in their Dropbox account. Therefore if you wanted to
upload a file, you could drop it into your Dropbox folder, then compose an
email.

\- When attaching, the user uploads the file to their Dropbox account via the
Yahoo! Mail web interface.

Both of these ways will probably create a URL to the file on Dropbox (publicly
accessible, private with password, obfuscated single-use URL, etc).

[ Also, we're talking about webmail clients like Yahoo/Gmail/Hotmail. It
really seems like you're comparing them to Outlook+Exchange, which is
something completely different. ]

~~~
joecomotion
There are three integration points:

\- Share from Dropbox: when composing an email, insert a link to a file
already in your Dropbox.

\- Save to Dropbox: when reading email, save a received attachment to your
Dropbox.

\- Upload to Dropbox: if you try to attach file over the 25MB attachment size
limit, you're given the option to upload it to your Dropbox and link to the
file on Dropbox.

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ibudiallo
Yahoo mail is amazing, and I am referring to the classic version. It looks
like they are working hard to get some attention. Now this is much better news
than their latest acquisition

------
webwanderings
Yahoo already had an attachment service through another company. I can't even
recall the name of it now.

~~~
shawndumas
yousendit

~~~
webwanderings
No I'm sure it was something else.

~~~
shawndumas
just checked and it's yousendit: <http://imgur.com/n4drDdv>

~~~
webwanderings
Hmm...interesting. I recall an application listed in the side bar of Yahoo
mail (in one of their older interfaces) which I recall downloading and using
as a drive through windows explorer. Somehow I am quite sure it was not
yousendit because I do know yousendit through the time when they first
started. Anyways, I think this Dropbox/Yahoo integration is more of a PR hype
than a substantive item in itself.

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Pro_bity
If anyone is curious, this is the first step to monetizing email beyond ads.
Fast forward a few years and the store as much content as you want (Gmail
model) will be an exception not the rule.

~~~
vidarh
I very much doubt they'd go a step backwards. Yahoo had a "pay for more
storage" option, and it never made much money even with the ludicrously small
free storage quota (25MB?).

When Gmail launched and Yahoo panicked and increased limits, they quickly
realized that users actual e-mail storage use didn't grow very quickly - it's
probably far outpaced by growth in storage densities.

Shifting attachments to Dropbox gives sufficient space for most users on the
free tier "forever", but of course Dropbox gives users other benefits which
they might very well want to pay for.

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fatjokes
Cute, but I'm still not using Yahoo! Mail for anything except spam.

~~~
lightup88
Forget Yahoo for Spam. I'm pretty well sold on Mailinator for disposable
email.

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taopao
I wonder what the implications are for legal document retention?

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kevingibbon
Congrats Yahoo! and Dropbox! Looks like a great integration. Very similar to
what Attachments.me has done for gmail to Dropbox, Box, Skydrive and Google
Drive.

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ngoel36
Gmail->Mailbox->Dropbox->Yahoo Mail

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af3
expect Yahoo! toolbar in the Dropbox installer soon ;)

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qued
Unless I get some free DropBox space by using Yahoo, I don't care.

