It is impossible to create a shared folder without emailing people

[BadlyDesigned]

I haven't used dropbox in a long time. Now I try to sign in and make a shared folder and I find that it is impossible, the site forces you to email other people to make the folder. 

What is the dumb point of this? I just want to make a shared folder, put things in it, and THEN send people links to those things to look at them. They will be  people I don't even know yet and whose emails I don't have. 

Can someone just tell me how to make a shared folder, which I assume is what I have to do to put things in a folder and then share them with people, unless the dropbox terminology is poorly defined, and not have to email other people? 

Seriously, whoever designed this should be fired for not having human sense. Obviously you should just make any folders you want like in a Win system, and then send the links to whichever ones things in them to whoever you want. Why would it be any other way? 

[Jane · Accepted solution]

Hey there, I understand where you’re coming from, however it would be worth noting that email notifications aim to alert your colleagues/coworkers that you wish to share content with them & they’d need to add the share to their account, in order to get going with that. 

If you wish to avoid that, you can grant colleagues/ friends View-Only access for content residing in your account through a shared link :link:, which you can easily include it in a chat, message &c. (i.e. you don’t necessarily need to know their email address in this scenario).

Other than that, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts; positive or negative, everything you're sending us over helps us better understand your needs. As our team is always looking for ways to improve, I’ll make sure your feedback is passed along to them.

Please do let me know how you get on with my pointers above or in case you have any further inquiries & I’ll check back with you asap!

[Rich]

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@BadlyDesigned wrote:

What is the dumb point of this? I just want to make a shared folder, put things in it, and THEN send people links to those things to look at them.

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Uh, why can't you just create a folder, put your things in it, and THEN share it when you have the list of people that need access? There's no need to create it as a shared folder if you don't need to share it at that point in time. Just share it when you're ready.

[glassfull]

Hi

I also would like to know why I can't do this.  

The way that we work is we create folders to share with clients, but we don't want to email them via Dropbox because that uses an email address that we don't share with clients.  We do all of our project management via another system but utilise DB to hold the files.

This is the reason we have moved away from Dropbox and now use Google drive - we have a lot more control over what gets sent and how.  Nevertheless, there are still some customers that prefer DB over google drive, so it would still be nice to be able to do this.

We simply want to create a shared folder that clients can drop files into - and then we want to be able to send that folder link to them via another email system.

it's not too hard to understand - so why can't Dropbox accommodate that request?

The alternative is to allow us to communicate to other DB users via a selectable email address (not necessarily our account email).  This is possible in e.g. Xero when sending invoices, we can choose the email address the communication appears to come from (so that replies get sent to the right place).