Dropbox Transfer: Limitations

[jolberding]

I am a member of a Dropbox Business Advanced account.

I have spent some time examining the utility of the Dropbox Transfer feature. It has potential, as far as I can see, in the "Send by email" method so that views and downloads can be managed and generate notifications, along with the identity of the viewer/downloader (the scope of this post is therefore limited to the email delivery mode). However, I would expect the only knowable identity is that of the email recipient associated with the particular link provided, since no Dropbox account and only the link (plus a password if assigned) is necessary for viewing/downloading, correct?

Upon following the "Download files" link in the email, the recipient of multiple files is sent to a webpage that flashes the customized logo and the file list and then immediately turns to "Your files are on their way/Try Dropbox Transfer to send large files to others"/"Start your transfer", opening a Save As dialog box for "Transfer.zip":

The recipient at this point has no information about the files or their origin (Google Chrome is the browser). The logo, transfer name, and file list can only be obtained by subsequently clicking on "Back", which is not obvious. Yet "Download files" is the only link to the files in the email sent to the recipient. Can a recipient be presented with the file list or the opportunity to view or download individual files instead of just automatically going to "download all"?

Furthermore, while you can change the name of transfer, I am seeing this limited to only 28 characters for me. This is a low limit, especially given that the transfer is otherwise named with the name of the first file and accommodates many more than 28 characters. If the transfer name is not changed, the email subject is "[Username] sent you some files", an uninformative subject line for busy clients who are more interested in the name of their engagements than in my name. Any thoughts or workarounds?

Finally, a couple of issues with the delivered email itself. The customized logo at the top of the email is extremely, almost invisibly small as viewed in several email clients. I tried several different logos, so it is unrelated to the logo image file I was uploading. Can it not be the same, regular logo size as in the notification email when a file is simply shared under our Dropbox Business Advanced account? Also, why is the optional message both italicized and placed in quotes without any information about the quoted content? This looks sloppy. A normal Dropbox file share email notification states, "[UsernameFirst] said:". I would like this section to serve as an abbreviated "signature line" so that clients have a better sense of how to contact me (i.e., phone number) if they have trouble . Otherwise, they are left with: "Questions? Ask [Username] ([Username's email])".

Dropbox Transfer is potentially a powerful tool for delivering work product to clients. I am hoping I am mistaken about some of these apparent limitations or that they will be improved in time.

Joe

[Daphne]

Hey @jolberding, I hope you're well today!

For seeing who downloaded files from the Transfer, you'll only be able to see by who if you sent it to them by email.

If they then passed on the link to another person, you would see it was downloaded but not by who it was.

When you open the link from the direct email for the Transfer, it does indeed go straight to the page shown in your screenshot, which I understand may not be ideal if you want to allow them to preview the files first.

In this case, you can send them a link to the files, instead of via email, to allow them to first preview the files before downloading.

As for the subject line, there is indeed a character limit there. Also, I'm afraid there aren't any additional customization options for the custom logo.

While I don't have any workarounds to suggest for these options, you could post a request for more customization for these features in our dedicated area of the Community here. 

I hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions!