reMail Goes Open Source

Two weeks ago Google acquired the email search for the iPhone service reMail. Corsin provided a good history of the reMail service. Today founder Gabor Cselle has announced that the reMail service is now open source. Many users were upset when the reMail iPhone application was removed from the App Store shortly after the Google acquisition.

Gabor notes that he will be focusing on other projects at Google so it makes sense to open source reMail. The code is available on Google Code under the Apache 2.0 license.

Gabor notes, “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. Part of the reason email apps are hard is because you have to pay the tax of figuring out how to download email via IMAP, parse MIME messages, handle attachments, and store data. reMail has already solved these problems. If you have a great mobile email idea, I hope you will find reMail’s source code helpful in your quest.”

It seems a lot of the apps that Google acquires eventually become available as open source projects.