Product Reviews

Mailplane is an application designed solely to work with email accounts hosted by Google's free webmail service Gmail (also known as GoogleMail).

Like most webmail services Gmail works just fine as it is - in a standard browser window. Nevertheless, some people wish it was easier to keep a webmail account separate from the rest of their web browsing - to have it behave more like a proper email client. And that's what Mailplane offers.

At heart Mailplane's core is a Webkit browser and it's unlike any you've used before. It will display only your Gmail account, and provides a bunch of additional features that make using Gmail a little more convenient. Many of the problems Mailplane solves are the little niggles that don't stop people using webmail but do annoy over time.

Any Gmail user who has clicked a 'mailto:' link in a web page will know the frustration of having to wait for Mail (or another email client) to open, only for it to immediately quit. Standard webmail can't intercept these protocol calls, so these links have to be laboriously control-clicked to copy the address that they contain.

Not so with Mailplane. Because it appears to the rest of the system as a normal application, it can respond to those 'mailto:' links in the manner you'd expect.

Another issue is handling attachments,

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which is clunky and slow in any webmail system. Each file has to be found via a file browser and uploaded to the webmail service before it can be added to a message. While this doesn't normally take long for one file, it's still a niggle. All those short waits add up.

Mailplane acts like a mail client, which means you can drag files on to message windows and they will be automatically uploaded and added. Thus the file browsing step is eliminated. True, you don't save much time for attaching a single file, but over a longer period it all adds up - and it feels more efficient.

Mailplane has other tricks to show off too. Like Mail it can optimise the size of any photos you drag in as attachments. Also it integrates nicely with iPhoto, allowing you to click on the Mail button there to send an optimised picture directly to a new Mailplane message.

Mailplane replaces Gmail's built-in keyboard shortcuts with more Mac-like equivalents - Command-n for a new message, for instance. It elegantly handles multiple Gmail accounts and displays a status icon in the system Menubar.

Gmail is, of course, free and you have to put up with some little niggles (common to many web apps) but you do get a lot for nothing. So why should you consider shelling out about £12.50 for Mailplane?

It depends on your tolerance of those niggles. If they routinely drive you crazy and tempt you to return to normal email, then Mailplane is probably worth buying.

You could set up Mail to work directly with your Gmail account and provide a lot of Mailplane's features but that requires a certain amount of messing about with various prefs and settings at both ends of the system. It's not hard but it's yet another task that eats up your time.

Mailplane is an application for people who want to save time. It makes Gmail a little easier to use and offers a great deal at a very reasonable price.