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Comment by pibefision | Hacker News Reader

Why dropbox did not implemented something like this? Any idea?

Features do not simply exist by virtue of their possibility.

Nice quip but it doesn't answer the question. Dropbox has a good-sized engineering team and this is a feature useful enough that a third-party has implemented it for them. I would be very surprised if this was not a feature that Dropbox has discussed internally. So asking why they didn't do it is a reasonable question, even if the real answer is "they didn't get around to it yet".

Half the fun of having an API is letting third parties do your feature viability testing for you. :)

I thought the implied answer was, "They didn't think of it." not "they didn't get around to it yet".

Usually it is, but in this case, I would bet money that Dropbox has floated the idea internally.

They had to've. In fact, Drew cited the following in his YC app:

# What are people forced to do now because what you plan to make doesn't exist yet? Email themselves attachments.

http://files.dropbox.com/u/2/app.html

Thanks, good to know my money is safe :-)

https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/20/email-files-to-dropbox

It's one of the most requested features on dropbox, but isn't one of the "in progress" features.

Thanks! :) I need to drink more mvp kool aid asap! :)

They have a feature voting system called Votebox under which emailing files to dropbox is highly requested with 19,874 votes.

You have to be logged in to dropbox to access it:

https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/20/email-files-to-dropbox

It is a non-trivial problem. Emails can be spoofed pretty easily. Could open up security vulnerabilities.

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