The History of Newly Acquired reMail

By now you probably have heard that reMail, an email search client for the iPhone, has been acquired by Google and was removed from the AppStore. What is a little bit more interesting in my eyes is a look back at how reMail has evolved. Let’s take a look at what reMail looked like in version 1, and what has changed.

In the very first business plan Gabor showed me, the idea for his startup was completely different. I can’t talk about this publicly, because I think this could be something Google might be interested in as well. But if you know Gabor and know how “obsessed” he is with email, you can imagine how cool his initial idea was.

reBoxed

Even before the first version of reMail was available, Gabor made some good press by creating reboxed. Basically it was just a way to learn about the GMail API along with fetching and displaying emails. But what reBoxed did, was force you to prioritize between two of your GMail contacts. You could select if emails from your boss are more important than emails from your team-leader or girlfriend.

Version 1.x

A month later, on May 11th 2009, version 1.0 of reMail was released. In this first version of reMail, you didn’t download all of your emails to your iPhone. Instead, you paid a monthly fee to reMail and then submitted your email credentials. reMail then connected via IMAP to your email servers, downloaded all your emails to their servers and started indexing them. The search was extremely fast and smart.

reMail Search doesn’t just search the subject, to, and from – it’s full-text search of your email, on your device.

Even better, reMail Search works offline! You can search your email when you’re driving through a tunnel or when you’re in a plane. Our server syncs emails you’re likely to search for on the device, and you can search them even when you’re offline. When you’re offline, you can search your entire email archives – with older search results coming from reMail’s server.

Maybe you already see the problem: you allow reMail to connect and download your emails. Many people wanted a better email search than what Apple had included in the iPhone’s mail application. But handing out credentials is something very sensible. TechCrunch Jason Kincaid noted:

The biggest issue, though, is privacy. ReMail works by sucking in your messages from your IMAP server and hosting them on its own server, which is optimized for rapid searching. Cselle says that the server is secure and that all messages are encrypted, but acknowledges that ReMail does have access to your Email. The company vows never to access or read any of it, unless they are given written permission to do so in the case of a support issue.

Version 2.x

So instead of connecting and indexing the emails on reMail’s servers, the version 2.x of the application (released in August 2009) downloaded all or selected email folders to your iPhone. One of the biggest challenges the team had to overcome was the limited storage space on your iPhone. Hundreds of thousands of emails can easily add up to several Gigabytes of data. But they managed to make it work! And 100,000 emails only needed 500 MB (5.12 KB/email) when downloaded and indexed. The initial price of the iPhone app was $4.99, and was increased to $9.99 after September 1st.

On September 21st reMail for GMail was launched. It allowed you to connect a single GMail account to reMail. The price was $1.99.

The business model of reMail changed on December 14th 2009 once again. Instead of charging for basic features like GMail connectivity, the basic features are now free.

Support for Gmail and Google Mail accounts is included for free. You can purchase IMAP support inside the application,by clicking on “Buy reMail Features”. IMAP support costs $3.99:

In November 2009, reMail announced the availability of a $0.99 reMail version for Rackspace customers.

reMail version 2.11 seems to be the last released version of the application before Google bought the small and smart startup. In an interesting move, somebody has claimed to reverse engineer reMail and release it as open source. Personally I don’t think this is ok, but I can also understand that people seem to depend on reMail and the possibility to search emails very fast and in an easy way.

I really hope Gabor can fulfill his vision of email at his new job at Google.

Editor’s note: Corsin Camichel covers technology and European startups on his blog, Geekness.