App review: reMail

review by Christine Chan


For those of us with iPhones (and iPod Touches), it’s more than likely that we constantly use our emails on the devices. This is a given. Email has become one of our most important communication tools, especially on mobile devices. But when we have tons of email, what if we need to search for something specific? Yes, we did get Spotlight Search in iPhone OS 3.0, but it’s not enough. And this is where reMail comes in.

What’s reMail? It’s an app that does one thing only, but it does it extremely well – it’s an email searching tool.

Also, reMail is quick and easy. And supports multiple accounts with the latest update. Previously, it was only one account, but now you can add as many as you’d like, and it will search through all mail in all the accounts simultaneously.

Before you can start searching, you will need to add accounts and download all the email messages in them. Depending on how much you have, this can be quick or take a while. Wi-Fi is recommended. If you need to exit the app for any reason while it’s downloading, it will simply pick up where you last left off when you launch it again. The downloading of messages actually stores them locally on the device, so they will be accessible without an Internet connection.

The reMail Status icon (which resembles the iPhone’s Home button) will show you the total messages on the server and the messages on your device, along with Estimated Time Remaining for when you are downloading new messages. Each message takes very little space. If you’re worried about how much space your email will take, you can see how much is being used and how much is remaining on your device.

Why should you use this over the native Spotlight Search for email? Well, have you noticed that the Spotlight Search only searches the subject line of your emails? Meaning that if there’s something you’re looking for that is contained in the body of the message, the Spotlight won’t find it. reMail searches through ENTIRE messages, meaning you won’t miss anything if what you’re searching for is hidden away at some part of the email body.

There is also an Autocompletion feature when you are typing in your search term. As you start typing, contacts and email addresses that have matching letters will begin to pop up – if any of them are what you’re looking for, just tap it.

If the autocomplete feature doesn’t help you, that’s ok. Just keep typing your term and then hit Search, and all emails with any mention of that term in any field of the email will be fetched for you.

The app will also save your searches, so if you have something you need to constantly search for, just search for it once and you can do it again later without needing to type it out again. A great time saver, and helps when it’s one of those times you need to search for something specific but then you forget – you won’t if it’s already in front of you.

All fetched emails are pulled from the servers, and you can keep loading more results.

The latest update also added some new features. You can get little badges for your level of usage, and view all email messages for designated email accounts or every single message, all at once. This is like a streamlined ‘everything-in-one-inbox’ system, but you can also have it separated if you choose.

Overall, reMail is a very good tool to search through massive inboxes (or just a better solution than Spotlight Search). If you’re an email junkie, this is definitely worth a look. It’s everything that Apple should have included with Mail.app and Spotlight Search, but didn’t.

reMail is available for $4.99 in the App Store.