Tech For Life

Mailplane is an email client for Mac OS X that allows you to use a lot of OSX’s built in friendliness and helpfulness with Google’s Gmail email accounts. I have been on the beta for quite some time, and the makers have decided it’s now time to recoup some of their time and resources by selling the application license for $24.95 ($19.95 for beta users ) which allows you to use Mailplane on up to 2 Macs. I can hear the question on your lips already, ‘Why should I part with my hard earned cash when there is a perfectly usable interface on Gmail’s website?’. And you may well ask…

Fortunately, there are a number of very good reasons why you should use Mailplane. The one that springs imediately to mind is that as an application, rather than a website, it integrates with OS X. If you want to attach a file, you just drag and drop onto the application window, rather than having to use the “Browse” button to snoop around your Home folder till you find what you want to send.

Another fantastic feature of Mailplane (Can you tell I like it?) is also to do with attachments. If you drag a large picture onto the application window to attach it to an email, Mailplane will automatically resize and optimise that picture based on settings that you can alter in the preferences pane. You don’t have to have this switched on, but I have found that nine times out of ten I actually do want the message to be as ’slim’ as possible, and this feature takes all the pain out of downsizing.

The integration with OS X goes further, you can use the application icon in the taskbar to start an email with a screenshot, just select “New message with screenshot…” and you get the option to select the screen area, it the optimises, and attaches the picture, and off you go. Want to send photos from iPhoto? No problem, Mailplane scomes with a plugin for iPhoto. All you do is select the photos, click “Email” and a new message box pops up with the photos optimised and attached.

It’s fully Growl capable, and perhaps best of all, it looks, acts and feels just like you are using Gmail inside Firefox or Safari, except it’s quicker. As an application, you can set it as the default for mailto: tags, and as the overall default email client.

I know that Thunderbird etc can now use Gmail through IMAP, but I think a lot of the usefulness of Gmail is in the tags, and the way it handles ‘conversations’, both of which are perfectly replicated in Mailplane, and not in Mail.app or Thunderbird.

So, I think it is well worth a look. If you use Gmail day in day out, then I think that $25 is an acceptable price for all of the additional features, and increased ease of use that Mailplane brings. To be honest, even if your use of gmail is entirely recreational, the iPhoto integration and the resizing of images are worth the money by themselves. I’m sure you will love it!