
Nowadays you can consult Gmail from any mail client like Mail.app or Thunderbird and. Mailplane was originally created back in the days when IMAP support wasnt available in Gmail and you could only access it from your browser.

In future, it would be nice to see a simultaneous open inboxes feature in the app but until then, it’s the best way of managing multiple Gmail inboxes I’ve found. Mailplane is an excellent tool for anyone that has multiple Gmail accounts and needs to switch between then regularly. The big advantage I’ve found though is that managing multiple inboxes with Mailplane is so much easier than doing it in your browser.Īlthough you can’t have more than one Gmail inbox at the same time, Mailplane makes switching between them much quicker and less hassle that in Firefox. I like the fact that by clicking on the Menu bar icon, a drop down menu shows you the subject heading of unread mail in each inbox. When new mail arrives, a Mailplane icon in your Menu bar will indicate how many are waiting to be read and each account features a number next to it indicating the amount of mail in that particular inbox. You can add as many accounts as you want using the Accounts button. A similar feature also works for taking screenshots and sending them instantly via Gmail. Alternatively, you can drag and drop attachments such as photos and documents onto mail while you’re composing it which is another very nice feature of Mailplane. There are also buttons for quickly adding photos (with special integration for iPhoto) and managing downloaded items. Along the top of the interface, you have buttons for replying, sending, printing, forwarding etc much like any other mail client. Like a mail client, Mailplane works outside of your browser. Nowadays you can consult Gmail from any mail client like Mail.app or Thunderbird but unlike Mailplane, none of them are made specifically for the use of Gmail or make managing multiple accounts so easy. Mailplane was actually created back in the days when you needed access to your Gmail account from your desktop but IMAP support wasn’t yet available. The best answer I’ve found to this problem is Mailplane. This is even more annoying if you’ve got other Google apps open at the same time because it logs you out of those too. Until recently, I’d been using the Firefox Gmail Manager Plugin but it’s an absolute pain because having two different Gmail accounts open in separate tabs automatically logs you out of both accounts after a few seconds.

But overall it works well, and it offers a good combination of the advantages of a standalone e-mail client with the features of Gmail.One of the frustrating things about having multiple Gmail accounts is managing them all at the same time.
MAILPLANE APPKED MAC OS X
Mailplane has a few minor issues here and there, most of them apparently due to the fact that the program is stuffing a Web application into a Mac OS X program. You can assign labels to messages and conversations using a similar procedure. (You can’t log in to two accounts at the same time, however.) I also like Mailplane’s keyboard navigation: press Shift+G and a Navigate box pops up type enough of the name of a Gmail view or label to uniquely identify it, and then press return to jump to that view.

One of my favorite features is that you can set up multiple Gmail accounts in Mailplane select one in the Accounts drawer and click on Switch To, and Mailplane logs you out of the current account and into the new one. And the program supports both Address Book for adding recipients and OS X’s media browser for adding photos and other media to messages. Mailplane can notify you of new messages via its Dock icon, a menu-bar item, and audible alerts. A plug-in for iPhoto lets you send photos from within iPhoto using Mailplane.

You can set Mailplane-and, thus, Gmail-as your default client, so clicking an e-mail link in any program opens a new Gmail message in Mailplane. As a standalone e-mail client, Mailplane also supports standard OS X features.
