reMail Archive

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.

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.
Continue reading “The History of Newly Acquired reMail” »

reMail founder Gabor Cselle has just announced on the reMail blog that the service has been acquired by Google. Cselle notes that he will be re-joining the Google Gmail team as a product manager. I say re-joining because Cselle worked as an engineering intern on the Gmail product back in 2004. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

If you aren’t familiar with the service, reMail is an email search for the iPhone. reMail was part of the winter 2009 Y Combinator class.

Cselle notes that the reMail iPhone application has been removed from the iPhone App Store and will no longer be available for purchase. He notes, “You might be wondering what will happen with reMail’s product. Google and reMail have decided to discontinue reMail’s iPhone application, and we have removed it from the App Store. reMail is an application on your phone. If you already have reMail, it will continue to work. We’ll even provide support for you until the end of March, and we’ve enabled all paid reMail features for you.”

With all of the Gmail Buzz talk as of late and with their team apparently having to work overnight for a few days (the horror!), more product managers will be welcomed to the team.

Update: In the comments, Paul Short makes a smart prediction, “Ah ha! I’ll bet you one cupcake and a subway ticket that reMail ends up as an app on one of those Google phones! (as if it’s not obvious already…).”