Minbox - a faster workflow for sending files | Hacker News Reader

Minbox - a faster workflow for sending files

minbox.com

58 pointssuperchink35 comments

Yay! thanks :) That looks like the Dropbox replacement I was hoping for to use at work.

Some questions:

1. How about transparent GZIP-ing files. For example, I ofter have to send large CSV files, but my recipients are not always skilled enough to unzip them

2. Is there a way for end-to-end encryption, if my recipient also uses your tool? Urls including a ?key=ABCDFGHJKL part come to mind... For example, you could randomly generate an AES CBC key on my machine, use that to encrypt, and produce an URL that my customer can use to decrypt it.

3. How does the mail get sent? Apple Mail? custom server? Do I need to hand out my SMTP login data?

4. How do you make money? Please clarify on your page that this is not one of those "we sell your data" schemes.

This looks promising :) Best regards, Hajo

Thanks for the feedback! (Minbox developer here)

> 1. How about transparent GZIP-ing files.

This is an interesting idea! We've been mostly focused on receiving zipped files and extracting their contents, but I could see a "auto-zip" feature at some point.

> 2. Is there a way for end-to-end encryption

We use SSL on all uploaded data, enforce SSL-only on our download links and gallery pages. That said, this is email we're talking about, so if you're truly worried about encryption, this might not be what you're looking for.

> 3. How does the mail get sent?

Depends. You can hook up your Gmail account (using OAuth2) and we can send via your SMTP server. Or if you prefer, we can send the email from our own SMTP servers on behalf of you.

> Do I need to hand out my SMTP login data?

No. You can use Gmail OAuth, or you can just sign up for a regular account (no SMTP credentials required)

> 4. How do you make money? Please clarify on your page that this is not one of those "we sell your data" schemes.

Our plan is to introduce a premium option with additional features, and no time limit on the files we store. Files in free accounts are removed after 30 days. This is all laid out on our homepage: http://minbox.com/#pro

Actually, if you've got your webserver configured correctly, it's not even "auto-zip" - your server sends gzip and the browser unpacks it transparently.

Kinda good idea, but maybe not. Major problem being that it's too easy to accidentally interrupt (even temporarily) a transfer that you had already forgotten because you thought of it as "sent"/"done" by eg shutting/sleeping your computer down.

I had an idea a while back to make an SMTP server that would automatically strip out attachments, dump them on a web server, and re-write the email with a link to the attachments.

I would still love to see something that does this type of thing automatically (such as through an Outlook plugin or SMTP relay) so you can use don't have to change your workflow to get the benefit.

This has been something that I've looked at a few times over the years. There have been a number of FLOSS and commercial projects that have tried to do this (and all that I'm aware of have sputtered out). A defunct product called "Mailonator" (http://web.archive.org/web/20080611060558/http://www.mailona...) did exactly what you're talking about.

We did this at my previous workplace. We stripped emails, encrypted them, and sent an email with the link to the files. Only an approved app was then able to open such files.

I misread the title as faster sending, rather than faster workflow. For dropbox we just use shared folders which work no matter what else is going on (network connectivity, machines sleeping, reboots etc).

I'd be overjoyed if someone could figure out faster sending. My DSL maxes out at 100 kbytes/sec upstream. Sending someone something like a mongodb dump involves a long wait while I locally compress it, and an even longer wait while it gets uploaded. I'd gladly have all 4 cores (plus another 4 hyperthreaded) plus 32GB of RAM dedicated to getting the files uploaded quicker. In theory some of the compression tools can do this, but some aren't multithreaded, or require a lot of research to figure out workable command line options and even then they consider 4GB to be an outrageous amount of memory. Often you have to wait for the compression to finish before you can even start the sending.

Perhaps you should have a look at pigz, a multi-threaded implementation of gzip. It uses the same flags as gzip, so -# specifies speed (-1 runs the fastest with the least compression ... -9 runs the slowest with the best compression), and by default it spawns as many processes as you have processors. I've never done any formal benchmarks, so I'm not qualified to speak as to its efficiency, however.

Based on your late-90's upload rate (and assuming you're working with large files that compress nicely), I'd say the more time you spend on compression, the less overall time you're looking at. That 100kb/s (theoretical) limit is really the first bottleneck you should be fixing, though.

[edit]: I completely misread that as kilobits/s. Point still stands minus the 90's bit.

I usually use pbzip2 which is multi-threaded bzip2. As for efficiency, gzip -9 uses a 32kb window while bzip2 -9 uses a 900kb window. This plus other improvements is why bzip2 beats gzip.

> I'd say the more time you spend on compression, the less overall time you're looking at.

That turns out not to be the case. For example xz (-9 uses a 65MB window) does indeed result in better compression. However it isn't multi-threaded and uses considerably more cpu time. The extra time taken is beaten by using pbzip2 which can start the upload sooner. 7z does allow multi-threading if you can navigate it's command line options.

BTW here is a quick test. I have a json file that is 8.1GB.

    442MB  3m12s  single threaded gzip -9
    309MB  23m    single threaded bzip2 -9
    326MB  25m    single threaded xz -9

As a followup, the most effective way to minimize upload time would be to start from the front of the file with gzip or something similarly quick, and simultaneously start the heavyweight compressions from the end of the file. When the two meet the more compressed content gets sent for the remainder of the file.

This definitely looks cool, but some of the wording on the marketing page comes off as a bit cocky to me.

Funny video and interesting app, although it's kind of misleading. It doesn't actually send files faster, you still have to wait the full upload time. What it does do is allow you to forget about the upload... it will automatically send once it's ready.

Good job overall, I might get it when it's available on windows.

Thanks zombio. But it actually DOES send faster. 2x faster than Dropbox and Google Drive...

Do you have the numbers to back that up?

Your page mentions uploads to S3 - do you do regional matching with appropriate region buckets? I've seen numbers that are sub 1Mbps when you hit the wrong S3 region yet I can reliably hit 900Kbps - 1.2Mbps, if not faster at times, with Dropbox.

Can you provide some average upload speeds you've seen? (Even from a non-residential connection is fine.)

Also - you state unlimited size, but even multipart upload to S3 claims a 5 TB max object size limit. Did you work around that somehow?

How'd you get the rights to 1) the music, and 2) the video clip that's used?

These guys are spamming twitter hard. Very strange.

https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=minbox&src=typd

I liked: "And Usain Bolt built our servers." :) One question though: since you upload the file later (behind the users back), how do you know when the other person can download the file?

If you could stuff a download URL signed for S3's PUT in a custom header (in order to do a bucket to bucket copy), this would make a great large file uploader for SaaS services that store user files on S3 too. User would send the file to something like upload@thesaasservice.com and some kind of mechanism to validate identity.

Then get resuming working as well as Dropbox of course :)

I think the video needs to be clear what the difference in the service is. It's not that you can't send a dropbox link till it's ready (you can, the recipient just can't see it yet). The feature here is that Minbox sends the email when the file is ready, on its own. Which is awesome, but not what the video is showing. That bit is the last feature listed on the page.

Seriously, they need to work on a decent elevator pitch. The video is annoying and too long, and their webpage goes on and on and on without clearly stating why they are better then all the rest. Should I try them - who knows? Will it make my work flow better/faster/easier - who knows? Ironically they dis dropbox, but everyone knows what dropbox is and does.

I wish I could just send email like that. Click an icon, a 350x250px box pops up, add address, subject, message and hit 'send'.

You can! Minbox does that too... AND there's a global keyboard shortcut to compose a new message (CMD+Option+N).

What if you actually want to send someone RAW files, or big videos? Can they access them, or do they only get compressed/resized ones? Seems like a shame to go to all this effort to make a fast service, then force users to obfuscate their stuff by putting it in a tarball or something.

Option is yours!

http://ge.tt does (from what I can see) the same thing without being Mac specific or locking you into just emailing your files rather than, say, tweeting them. It might be good to mention the differences.

This UI is a bit neater, though.

> Does the Pope sh*t in the woods?

Is a bear catholic?

Terrible promotional video for what seems a nicely designed app (try playing it without the sound).

Video player says "No video with supported format and MIME type found." Using FF 20.0 on OSX.

The video is probably gonna be offputting for some people but it's hilarious. I actually laughed out loud at it.

me too. I was actually hoping they'd "do it again" at the end of the video, and then they did.

While I understand it technically I feel like the video is incredibly misleading. It's demonstrating time-to-share a link which (at some point) will contain a file. It's not demonstrating time-to-upload a file like the video suggests by comparing directly against dropbox.

Incredibly misleading? Obviously it doesn't give you 8Gbit internet, it just saves your precious time. You don't have to spend five minutes on a task. It's not like Bruce was going to download that file as soon as he got the message, and that's assuming it sent right away, which it could avoid by delaying the email by those same 5 minutes.

In terms of workflow, it's a huge improvement.

If you drop a file into your Dropbox Public folder you can share it instantly though.

Not anymore! They deprecated that feature, only exists for old users.

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