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Full text searches on the iPhone? There WAS an app for that.

by David Winograd Feb 25th 2010 at 10:00AM

Sometimes you can't win for losing. A few weeks ago, I was talking to fellow blogger and all-around genius Brett Terpstra about how I wished there was a full-text search for iPhone mail. He told me that there was, and it was called reMail. I immediately downloaded the free app, paid the US $3.99 for the in-app feature of using IMAP mailboxes, and reMail started downloading copies of all my mail. This took overnight, but so what? When done, I could search on any word or term just like the Macintosh Mail application, and be rewarded with a listing of all the incidences of the term in my 3,000 or so email messages in a fraction of a second.

This worked like a dream. I immediately put reMail on my home screen and was happy. At least, that was, until last week when I read that Gabor Cselle, reMail's creator, announced that the app was being put out to pasture, and was immediately being removed from the App Store. Google both bought the app and hired Gabor to be a Product Manager on the Gmail team.

As a nice gesture, Gabor decided to keep supporting reMail until the end of March and make the two in-app purchases free. Along with IMAP support, you could also buy the option of having it work with Rackspace email. And thus started the conspiracy theories. Techcrunch surmised that this could be another shot over the bow in the Apple-Google smartphone war, and that Google bought the technology to kill it off, so Apple couldn't buy it first. There may be something to that since reMail is arguably a better mail app than the one that built into the iPhone.

On the other hand, it may be that Google, seeing a widening of the search market, wants to build reMail's functionality into another product. It would be foolish, in my opinion to not do so. Google has worked with Cselle before as part of the Gmail team and knows what he can do. With reMail as part of the bargain, he's more important to them than during his earlier tenure.

There is a rumor floating around that someone has reverse-engineered reMail and will release it as open source. This could be interesting and may change the game, but it may be just a rumor. Whatever happens, it'll be intriguing to keep your eye on the evolution of mail apps on smartphones, and to learn just what Google has in mind.




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Sometimes you can't win for losing. A few weeks ago, I was talking to fellow blogger and all-around genius Brett Terpstra about how I...
 

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Paul B

@Alex: I just tried it again and it's still giving me the Error 0xffffffff message. I looked at my mail server logs (I run my own) and it shows this: Mar 4 12:43:31 hevasql dovecot: imap-login: Disconnected (no auth attempts): rip=166.137.8.134, lip=206.204.216.33, TLS handshaking: Disconnected

It's like it's not even trying

March 04 2010 at 12:53 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Enrico

@David Thanks for the help! Now it works! :)

February 25 2010 at 6:47 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Enrico

Excuse me, but... I just checked for the in-app purchases in ReMail, which I own, and they're still not-free, and quite expensive too: Imap costs 2.99 €.
Maybe the freebie is just for the US market?

February 25 2010 at 6:27 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Enrico's comment
David Winograd

I'm not sure, but tap on 'buy reMail features' and then 'restore purchases'.
That changed the prices to free for me.

February 25 2010 at 6:37 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
tk

For being a search giant, gmails webbased search has been chronically terrible (ironically) and only recently has started to get much better.

Users of gmail have been complaining for years to improve gmail search.

If this technology helps search mail better, then I can I see why google will want it... For more than just imap searches

February 25 2010 at 12:07 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Bill

I've been a happy user of reMail in all its instantiations on the iPhone and wish Gabor every success. I'd love to see a more robust "native" Gmail app (rather than web app) on the iPhone than the current Mail program: message threading, stars, etc.

Anyone else?

February 25 2010 at 11:38 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
BoxOfSnoo

Has nobody ever heard of DeepFish? Seems like I have to point it out on every panicked blog post about this subject... http://www.webis.net/products_info.php?p_id=deepfish

February 25 2010 at 11:38 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to BoxOfSnoo's comment
Paul B

I think TUAW had something on deepfish before. I downloaded it but I can't get it to work and their support doesn't seem to get back to me. They replied once asking for a log but I sent it to them multiple times and still haven't gotten a reply. Deepfish not so good

February 25 2010 at 3:11 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Alex

Hi Paul. Not sure when you used DeepFish, but I know we've looked at all issues in the past and fixed them as they came up. We got logs from a lot of people early on, fixed a lot of little bugs. The latest DeepFish *should* work for you. Since you already bought it, grab it again from the Apple Store (free upgrade) and let me know how it works out.

February 25 2010 at 6:09 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Proto732

FYI: This type of search is built in for Exchange accounts. I moved my personal email to a hosted exchange account a few years ago for Push Email, Contact/Calendar syncing, search ... Can access the server from a variety of platforms phones, outlook, internet appliance, web browser ... everything in sync. Definitely the way to go.

February 25 2010 at 11:13 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Chris Aubeck

When I discovered the annoying black page that pops up when you accidentally press the home button more than you need does not allow you to search in all documents stored by apps on the phone (Word, PDF, etc.) I realised the iPhone was not for me.

February 25 2010 at 11:09 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Nic

Or as much more likely the real interest was in Gabor Cselle as he was an Google employee before and left to develop things like reMail.

Seems much more logical that Google wanted him just as much as the technology that will no doubt find its way into various Google offerings.

February 25 2010 at 11:06 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Murphy Mac

It would be nice to be able to search for keywords in iPhone Photos. And Safari bookmarks. And some other stuff.

February 25 2010 at 10:43 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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