Dropbox acquisition Mailbox has expanded from its single service roots with support for Yahoo Mail, iCloud, Me.com and Mac.com accounts. Previously, the client supported only Gmail inboxes, making its audience large but limited.
Mailbox said it had more requests for iCloud and Yahoo Mail support than for any other feature.
This release displays the influence of Dropbox — which has been by its nature a platform agnostic offering. Confining Mailbox to only Gmail was likely a matter of expediency and growth. But now that Mailbox has the resources of Dropbox behind it, they’ve managed to add in additional services for the first time.
The Mailbox purchase was a good signal that Dropbox was making moves to expand beyond a syncing service into a platform of tools. Given that it’s on a crash collision course with Box, which is coming in from the opposite (enterprise) direction, it makes sense for Dropbox to be cobbling together a set of unique productivity offerings it can eventually show to enterprise clients as a reason to use the platform. Box is in the process of doing the same.
The Mailbox update is out today for iOS. Unfortunately, thought there are now more mail service options, the app remains absent on Android. And the app won’t truly be service agnostic until it gains support for adding custom IMAP or POP services, but that’s for another day.