3 tools that let anybody upload files to your Dropbox account

Dropbox is a great service for file backup and sharing but not everybody uses it. This becomes a problem when you need somebody to send files to you, because this requires the person to signup for Dropbox and then you need to setup sharing and permissions for your online folders.

The following three services enhances file uploading to DropBox by completely skipping the steps involving signup, account setup and software download.

1. Airdropper is a new service that lets you request file from anybody, even if they do not have a Dropbox account. All you have to do is fill a form and send an email to the person containing a secure link. The recipient then hits the link in the email to upload their file using the AirDropper website. The uploaded file gets saved in your Dropbox account.

Airdropper allows multiple file uploads and there is no strict file size limit. The only niggling problem is that the target folder cannot be customized. All files are uploaded to a folder called ‘Airdropper’.

2. Send to Dropbox (this I wrote about earlier) is a service that allows anybody to upload files to your Dropbox account via email from any computer. After you have allowed Send to Dropbox access to your Dropbox account, you will be given an email address that delivers anything you mail to it as attachment directly to Dropbox. You can share this ID with your friends and they can send files directly to your Dropbox account. You can configure the folder where it will save the files and options to automatically extract contents of uploaded ZIP files are available.

A major advantage of using Send to Dropbox, over other services (MailDrop, for example) is you don’t require to install the Dropbox client or any other software to use it. This lets you quickly send files to Dropbox from any public computer without having to spend time setting up the computer.

3. Habilis is another service that allows you to send files to Dropbox by email. Once you sign up for a Habilis, you get an email address to which anyone can send files to and have it show up in your Dropbox account. The service is not accepting signups at the moment so I was not able to test it.