People calling for better e-mail search on the iPhone are getting a possible answer: reMail. The software app downloads e-mail to your iPhone or iPod touch and lets you search the full text of the copy — even offline. The app sells for $9.99, but the developer has it on sale for $4.99 through Sept. 1.
Here’s how it works: Run reMail overnight to complete the download. The developers promise it won’t bog down your iPhone. One hundred thousand e-mails only take up 500MB of space — six percent of the capacity of an 8GB iPhone.
“My family lives in Switzerland and I live in San Francisco. One thing I’ve found very frustrating whenever I travel to see my parents are the insane fees that AT&T charges for data roaming. For Switzerland, AT&T charges $19.97 per megabyte,” said Gabor Cselle, CEO of reMail. “Now, with reMail, I don’t have to think twice about searching for meeting times or flight reservations. When I’m abroad, I just download all my e-mail over Wi-Fi and have data roaming turned off.”
The reMail Advantage
Cselle drew some comparisons between iPhone 3.0 mail and reMail. Beyond its ability to download e-mail with data roaming turned off, reMail also searches text.
Cselle, previously a software engineer at Google, was frustrated by the built-in header-only search in the iPhone 3.0 software because too often the words he sought don’t appear in the To, From and Subject lines. (iPhone Mail won’t find e-mail if the words aren’t in the headers — but reMail will.)
“We launched reMail Search a few months back, it was a server-based product. Searches were being done on the server, and you had to give us your e-mail password. It turns out people are very opposed to sharing their e-mail and password with third parties, especially a small startup,”…