The people that follow my personal tech-blog might already know about Mailplane, but I thought it was time to spread the word about Mailplane to a more mature crowd. Mailplane is a Mac OS X application that has Google Mail (Gmail) meet the desktop. It combines the power of a conventional desktop application (like Mail.app) with the flexibility and quality of an online email client.

Explaining the origin of the idea is best let to Ruben Bakker, the creator of the application:

“I really love Gmail. It is superior to Outlook and MS Exchange I experience at work: The Outlook Webclient is a joke, I get more spam than normal messages and server space is so limited I constantly must delete messages” …. “But I missed quite a few features that Mail.app and other traditional mail clients offer. Gmail with its browser interface just didn’t reach my desktop. For example uploading an attachment involved too many steps: Exporting the image from iPhoto, somehow resizing the picture and then attaching it by using the ‘Choose file’ button.”

So what does Mailplane really offer? For me the features and advantages are simple:

1. Gmail in it’s own application, instead of hanging around in my Safari, in a tab that I never close.
2. Integration with iPhoto, making it possible to simply email a photo from iPhoto, just as you would do with Mail.app. No templates though, so no nice photo emails as you can send from Mail.app.
3. Drag and drop attachments. Just drag and drop any file from your desktop straight into Mailplane as an attachment. Way easier than the web browser method. No support for folders though (would be nice to have it auto-zip folders (especially .app folders).

Mailplane runs on Tiger (no Leopard support yet as I tested yesterday) and even already supports iPhoto ‘08. It currently comes in multiple languages, with a Dutch version being added soon. I took the honor of localizing this app to Dutch, making this my first localization project. I hope it’s not too bad as my Dutch has degraded since my move to the UK.

For now it is free, but there are plans to license the application. I am hoping this price will stay low as I don’t see many people want to pay for something that is normally free. The current version is at 1.51 and is clearly still in Beta, including some bugs and lots of features to be added. That said I expect that Ruben will make future revisions of this app more and more interesting for people who want to use Gmail as a desktop app.

If you want an invite for the Beta, than drop me an email with your details on cbetta[at]gmail.com.

Update: Ruben just announced version 1.51 which comes in 6 more languages, including Dutch.