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I have no idea how i lived without mailplane (drag & drop attachments, copy and paste images, growl notifcations) and also have no idea how i'd live without the data rapportive brings to the party.
If you dig Mailplane and have an iPhone, check out Mailroom: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mailroom/id355023563

We've been inspired by (and are also addicts of Mailplane) but hated Mail.app, so we started enhancing Gmail's Mobile UI.

I've been looking for an app like this for a long time. Do you have an email? Have lots of feedback.
Awesome! Feedback welcome. Send to:

alex@indyhall.org

here's some i initial feedback...

first launch open the "Add account" window instantly

username = email address?

one account = change view to the client inbox rather than the "accounts" view?

The "address book" button doesn't work: says I need to be composing an email in order to add a recipient - despite being on the compose screen

thought about offering push notification for $n/month? I'd pay $1/month for it.

you need a website to pitch mailroom to users :)

you've already identified a bunch of things in our plans for cleanup and tuning.

As far as push goes, I talk about it here:

http://dangerouslyawesome.com/2010/02/mailroom-gmail-on-the-...

but the gist is this:

In order to accurately update badge icons over push, we’d need to store email addresses and passwords on a server somewhere, and that’s a security risk that we can’t figure out how to justify. I know I wouldn’t want that info out there, and I have to imagine that our users wouldn’t like it either.

We're hoping to find a more elegant way to do badge counts over push, but in the mean time, aren't offering it. Suggestions welcome.

And that website's launching this week to answer a lot of these questions, solicit feedback, and share some of the totally awesome testimonials from the userbase so far.

Alex, how does your search on Mailroom compare to Remail? I loved Remail's wicked fast search on my iphone.
the gmail iphone web search is awesome, mailroom uses that.
indeed, we're wrapping the webkit UI of gmail mobile, which has standard gmail search baked right in. Our app lets you easily switch between multiple gmail and google for your domain accounts, gives you access to your iPhone's native address book, offline support, and a few other goodies...and there's a lot more in our development pipeline.

the entire feature process is similar to mailplane though: we look at mobile gmail and say "how could we take whats already there and make it beter" or "what's missing and how can we add it"?

Big upcoming features include things like HTML email reading and the ability to add attachments, both major features missing from Gmail Mobile.

remail is 100% native search, because it's storing all of the mail locally. we can't quite touch that, but now that Remail is open source...maybe we'll take a look at what they've got going on.

One of the issues that I've had personally is that I can't search across multiple inboxes. Maybe using some of Remail's guts we can figure out how to make that work.

a hearty endorsement here for Mailroom: it takes exactly what I love about Mailplane on the Mac (switching between accounts; better at-a-glance indication of new messages; letting Gmail be Gmail instead of shoving it through IMAP and suffering through the sync/search/etc issues that will inevitably happen).
pclark, can you explain why you like mailplane so much?
starring emails is a critical part of (my) email work flow.

It's far too many clicks on the mail iphone app to "flag" an email, so I use the gmail web ui on my iPhone as my email client.

So then I want my starred emails to appear on my desktop too, right, so I use gmail in a web browser. But then when I quit my browser (or accidentally close the tab) I'm disconnected from email.

So I could wrap gmail in a fluid app. But then it's a very "dumb" mail client.

Mailplane adds a number of critical features to gmail on a desktop, specifically: drag and drop of attachments. copy and paste images into emails and they're attached. growl notifications of new emails or google chats.

Ah okay, so starring (which is not a part of my workflow) is the unique selling point. Thanks, got it!
I love Mailplane. I'm still looking for a solution this good for Windows/Linux.
I don't really understand; what's so special about Mailplane? It's just an email client right? What can it do that Mail.app or Outlook hooked up to your gmail account can't?

I must be missing something.

It can use Gmail's search features. (IMAP doesn't do that nearly as well.)
Same here... what's the problem being solved here? I get search through Mail.app just fine, growl notifications, drag&drop + copy&paste...
You can also add Rapportive as a UserScript to a Fluid.app instance of Gmail.
This may sound like heresy but I always find gmail search -- when I'm looking for something in the subject or sender -- to be a bit slow compared to search in a local mail tool like Thunderbird or Evolution or Mail.app.

If I need to search entire message bodies gmail is of course much faster, but often sender/subject search is all I need.