Gaston Garcia

Yesterday my 30 day evaluation period of Mailplane app ended. I enjoyed using it during the month and now I’m wondering if I should buy it.

So in case anyone doesn’t know about it Mailplane is an OS X app that embeds Gmail inside it’s window and empowers you with some pretty cool tools to make it work better for you. Here’s my favorite features from the big list they have in their site.

Drag and Drop attachments

This is the feature I’ll miss the most. Mailplane allows you to simply drag and drop any file into the Gmail window and it will turn in into an attachment. If you’re attaching images it will even ask you if you’d like to resize them to improve file size. Hitting the “Attach a file” link in Gmail is always annoying. This makes Gmail feel like any other OS X app.

Do Not Disturb Mode

Mailplane comes with it’s own Gmail notifier to let you know if you’ve got unread email in your inbox. But having the notifier saying “Hey, you’ve got 13 unread emails!” can be pretty distracting. So Mailplane let’s you hit the “Do not disturb” button and voila, problem solved. It will go into silent mode and won’t give you notifications of incoming (via Growl) or unread mail. It’s a great feature.

Fluid app as an alternative

Now here’s why I’m in doubt of purchasing Mailplane. Before trying Mailplane I was using Gmail embeded inside a Fuid app. In case you’ve missed it somehow, Fluid let’s you create site specific browsers. You can open and close the “site application” at will, improve it with Greasemonkey scripts, and not have to keep it open in another tab in your browser. (I use Gmail, Flickr and Basecamp as Fluid apps).

Since Fluid takes advantage of userscripts I use a Greasemonkey script that strips Google Ads from my emails. So I’m used to using an Ad free Gmail. Maiplane didn’t seem to have this enabled or to let me enable it anywhere. And it’s a major thing for me.

So for now I’ll wait and see. I’m gonna go back to my Fluid app and see if I miss my favorite Mailplane features enough to buy it.

If you’ve got any tips and tricks for a better Gmail experience I’d love to hear them. These 2 are the best I’ve had. As for you, make sure you give Mailplane a try, it’s easy to fall in love with it.