reMail: Instant Search for the iPhone
January 6, 2010 – 8:41 am by Gabe Anderson | 3 Comments
reMail is like X1 for the iPhone.
As I’ve written here in the past, X1 is a must-have tool for anyone who’s serious about archiving and finding Outlook email — its instant search works so fast and so well partly because it keeps a copy of emails in its search index.
I love my iPhone as much as anyone, but searching my Gmail archives isn’t always easy via the built-in app — since the Mail app only searches what’s in your inbox. If I want to search the full archives, I have to fire up Safari, login to Gmail (since my iPhone often logs me out automatically), and use the browser-based search. This is fine in some circumstances and assuming I have an Internet connection.
But what if I’m on a plane, overseas, or just want to fire up an app and instantly find the message I’m looking for?
Enter reMail, a great app for the iPhone that downloads your entire email archive to your iPhone and makes it instantly searchable.
Yes, if you’re like me and have many gigs of email in your Gmail or other email app, it could potentially take days to download and index everything, but just plug in your iPhone overnight (or nights) and let reMail work its indexing magic. It’s well worth the wait.
After reMail has downloaded your email, it actually resides on your iPhone, which is also nice from a backup perspective (not that you can actually restore any email via reMail, but it’s comforting knowing it’s there and not only on the Gmail servers).
Once your mail is there, you can search for anything in your archive, and it comes up in no time. The full-text search works brilliantly — and it’s fast.
The app itself is free. There’s support for IMAP email ($3.99) as well as for Rackspace integration ($0.99), so if your company hosts its email there, you can easily index your work email, too.
Among other features, reMail gives you a number of advantages over the built-in iPhone Mail app:
- Searches Full-text
- Autocompletes Names
- Search History
- Saves attachments on iPhone
- Advanced search operations (prefix, not, or, etc.)
- Marks up matches
- Drastically faster search time
- All messages stored on phone
The support is superb as well, and I’ve even exchanged a few emails with Gabor Cselle, the man behind reMail, and have offered some product suggestions.
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Hi, I'm Gabe Anderson. I've published more than 2,000 personal and professional blog entries on my other blogs since 2000.
3 Responses to “reMail: Instant Search for the iPhone”
Gabe,
How many gigs does an iPhone have? Doesn’t your “gigs and gigs” of mail overload the system?
By Matt Kopans on Jan 6, 2010
It depends on the iPhone. 🙂 My 3GS is 32 GB. More importantly, reMail compresses the mail quite a bit. So my 4.6 GB of Gmail are compressed to less than 600 MB in reMail.
By gabe on Jan 6, 2010
So just in the month or so since plugging reMail, it’s been acquired by Google.
By gabe on Feb 23, 2010