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Comment by goronbjorn | Hacker News Reader

Beyond all of the complicated integration/feature scenarios people are proposing, what shouldn't be forgotten is the fact that email is the primary way most people send and receive files. Combine that with mobile fast becoming the primary computing device for most people, and you have an extremely sensible acquisition.

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Well said. Pretty easy way for all files you receive to immediately be in your Dropbox, and for Dropbox to either

a. launch an email service that runs off the space in your dropbox, or b. automatically create dropbox folders shared between all recipients of an attachment and automatically set permissions.

Step 0: get all of these people to use Dropbox as their email client

I', #538,902 on this waiting list so its working.

Do we need this with Gmail?

I can already use google's Drive storage for email attachments and attach a reference to the file.

Try sending someone any of the dozen different filetypes gmail has blacklisted sometime. They even peer into your archive files!

Maybe GDrive lets you store those formats, but I've never had GMail offer that as an alternative. It just stops me from sending executables around even though that is an integral part of what I do.

Well noted.

If you try attaching any file above 30 MB in GMail, it prompts you to send it "via Google Drive" instead, and automatically uploads it there.

Indeed, but of course email typically has a limit on the size of the file you can attach (for good reason).

In Outlook.com (was Hotmail), you can send a large file by sending a link to a file in SkyDrive. You don't have to upload the file to SkyDrive first; it's just an extension to the "attach file" feature within Outlook.com.

GMail has a similar integration with GDrive.

Agreed. Sparrow's upload via Dropbox instead of attachment feature is also really useful, so it seems like a perfect fit.

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