Mailplane — for Gmail fans

Not so long ago, a message slipped in one of the communities of the LiveJournal asking if anyone uses Mail.app — the built-in Mac OS X mail program? The opinion of the author of the post was that the Gmail web interface is so convenient that there is no need to use offline clients. We will not risk supporting or challenging this thesis, but we will tell you about one program aimed at working specifically with Gmail.

Mailplane is an email client created specifically for Gmail fans. At the moment, the program is in the closed beta testing stage (you can get an invitation on the developer's website, it came to me on the day of the request). We can say that Mailplane occupies an intermediate position between working with a web interface and an offline client.

In fact, you are still working with Gmail through its interface. All Mailplane does is add a little bit of desktop experience:

• Support for multiple accounts. You can quickly switch between multiple Gmail and Google Apps accounts
• You can customize the interface. As with almost any program, you can drag buttons to the toolbar here, adjusting them to your tastes.
• Easy to send attachments. You can add an attachment by dragging the file with the mouse, which no browser allows. It is more convenient to send photos using Mailplane, since there is built-in support for iPhoto.
• Processing mailto — regardless of which program you clicked on the email link, Mailplane will open to create an email. As far as I know, this is a unique feature — in the case of browsers, the Gmail window will open by clicking on an email link placed only on a web page.
• Notification system for new messages. Pop-ups, the number of unread messages displayed in the dock and in the menubar.
• Support for shortcuts, which is not in Mail.app
• Support for hotkeys. However, Gmail also has a set of hotkeys

What are the cons? The main one is the mandatory availability of an Internet connection. As soon as the connection is lost, the program will become absolutely useless. Hopefully, over time, either Google will add Gears support to Gmail, or the Mailplane developers will come up with something. And besides, I would like to be able to reassign hotkeys.