Google open sources reMail

reMail search on the iPhone.
Source: Google Following its recent acquisition by Google last month and removal from the App Store, reMail has now been released to the open source community. According to reMail founder and Gmail Product Manager Gabor Cselle, the iPhone OS mail client is being open sourced because he and his team will instead be focusing on other projects at Google. "As someone who is passionate about mobile email, my hope is that developers interested in making email-related apps can use reMail code as a starting point," said Cselle.

The reMail application allows users to download all of their email to their phone and search through it offline. The developers claim that the application is up to five times faster than the built in Mail.app when, for example, connecting to Gmail accounts and say that reMail only uses approximately 5 MB of space for every 1,000 emails it stores. Support for reMail is currently being phased out and will no longer be available at the end of March.

As reMail has been removed from the App Store, those interested in running reMail on their iPhone OS device must either jailbreak their iPhone or iPod Touch or join the iPhone Developer Programme at a cost of $99 per year. Cselle says that existing users that have already downloaded the application from the App Store are able to keep it as it is a client-only application. reMail source code is available on Google Code and is released under version 2.0 of the Apache License. Additionally, Cselle has created the "remail-iphone" group on Google Groups to answer any developer questions.

See also:

• reMail is now Open Source, a reMail Blog post.

(crve)