Send To Dropbox - Email files to your Dropbox | Hacker News Reader

Send To Dropbox - Email files to your Dropbox

sendtodropbox.com

53 pointsllambda27 comments

So we've finally come full circle. Wasn't Dropbox created because the founders were sick of emailing themselves files? IRONY!

I thought the idea arose when Drew lost his coveted USB key? [1] The frustration, however, of emailing files to himself no doubt helped in pushing him over the edge. [1] - http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropbo...

There's a qualitative difference here, which is that the emailed file will be permanently backed up and synced to all other computers which have your Dropbox installed. When you're on those other N computers, you don't have to go to your inbox to download the file N times, not to mention edits on any one computer will be synced also.

I'm afraid I can't access Dropbox everywhere, in fact most places where I need it and use an iPhone so when moving files around Email is the easiest for me.

I'd found this site a while ago because I won't load my Dropbox in my work laptop but I often wanted to put files in there. I found it a bit fiddly though and the files I wanted to upload weren't already in my email, they were on the web (e.g. PDF books, software installers)

So I built http://urlpipe.com, mostly as a way to play with node.js and Redis. Paste in a URL and it will pipe the file directly into your Dropbox. It's a work in progress but works for me!

(1) There's no contact info anywhere (obvious, at least) on urlpipe.com.

(2) "you're" is misspelled on the urlpipe home page.

Thanks! 1) fixed, I guess I wasn't really thinking of others using it 2) Duh!

This is exactly what I want. I need something good to queue downloads from my iPhone.

That was one of my main use cases too. The layout is responsive although there's still nightly problems with the input field and queued uploads table

nightly = some

very cool! great if i want to save bandwidth while in a coffee shop.. don't you have to pay for data usage ? or do you hand off the actual file transfer to dropbox?

It runs on Heroku and I scale up a single worker process to handle the file transfers, and shut it down when the queue is empty. This drastically reduces the costs – as it's mostly for my personal use, I don't allow multiple workers as a safeguard against unexpected expenses.

Does this do anything more than creating the same flow on ifttt? http://ifttt.com/recipes/39

This is perfect for me because the large institution where I work blocks dropbox.

Now if you could write an app that retrieves dropbox files via email... (or I could just remember to make sure my usb drive has the files mirrored, effort++)

You can always use the web interface. Is that blocked too?

Yup.

I think the idea is pretty interesting (at least on the surface), but after trying it a few times I wonder what the utility of it will be in practice. In particular, I'm trying to think of use cases where I would have access to e-mail, but wouldn't have access to either the Dropbox application itself or the Dropbox web interface.

And, as others have mentioned, the whole point of Dropbox for me was to avoid having to send file attachments in the first place.

I am a new dropbox user, so forgive me if this can be done a better way, but there are times where I want to upload something to dropbox from a computer that is not my own. This would be great for that

dropbox has a webinterface, just log in on their homepage.

I think the real use would be letting people add files to your dropbox without having to share a whole folder...e.x. clients giving you files without cluttering your inbox.

I don't think this would be useful for new documents. To me, it would be more useful for moving all of my documents that I have stored as email attachments that have been accumulating for years.

I use http://attachments.me/ for a similar purpose.

Really nice gmail integration.

EDIT: It allows dropbox uploads.

Sparrow email client on OSX has this feature too: https://sparrowmail.tenderapp.com/kb/starting-with-sparrow/d...

Though in addition to mailing stuff to yourself, you can archive other attachments in DB as well. Incidentally, never considered to be very useful because kind of a backwards way to share files.

Get Habilis used to do this, but has sadly died: http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=28736

I wonder if a similar fate will meet sendtodropbox.com? (at least they have less of a weird URL)

Great idea! How do you deal with the OAuth process to actually send files when the client isn't online with their browser?

You only OAuth the first time to tie the email address they give you to your DropBox account. After that, any emails sent to this secret address are sent to DropBox without further authentication.

We're trying to do something similar and our OAuth token expires after about 5 minutes from authentication. We can't seem to automate things from a CLI because of this and I'm curious how Send To Dropbox does it.

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