Yesterday brought the terrible news that yet another corporation decided to kill away an outstanding piece of software they had previously purchased from the original developers: Dropbox is killing Mailbox.
It's the Stanza kill by Amazon dejavu all over again, and Microsoft did the same thing to the Sunrise calendar only a few months ago.
The worrying thing about all this is that Mailbox has resembled Marvin a lot over the last year or so, in terms of lack of meaningful updates. They have both been in a comatose state, basically. Now Mailbox is officially dead – let's hope the end is not quite as near for Marvin.
Given Mailbox's demise and the lack of a meaningul replacement, it would make more sense for someone like Kris to create a high-quality email app. I've just taken another look at Sift, but it's just too elementary. The crucial missing feature in Sift for me is the inability to look at folders inside your email account. Sift also seems pretty difficult to get up and running. And Mailbox's finest feature, as I see it (the ability to drag a message up or down in any
unified folder to sort messages in a folder according to their priority), is offered by none of its competitors, so the "market niche" is definitely there, but there appears to be no one currently capable of filling it.