I'm sure that for non techies, having multiple gMail accounts is not an issue. I have acquired several accounts over the years—16 gMail accounts to be exact. How I came to have this many gMail accounts is another story, but most of them are for managing my clients' social media marketing emails. These are not accounts I need to access every day, but they do need checked once or twice a week. The tedious process of logging in and out of 16 gMail accounts is never the best part of my day.

I was looking for a way to manage my gMail accounts from my Desktop with minimum effort, without giving up the native gMail features. What i found was Mailplane.

Mailplane brings Gmail to your Mac desktop. Mailplane combines Gmail's spam protection, endless storage, global access, and unique user interface with great Mac features. Mailplane doesn't access your Gmail account via POP or IMAP, it uses the WebKit browser code so you get the native Gmail interface in a standalone program. Mailplane can store an unlimited number of gMail accounts, and it also works with Google Apps.

To get started with Mailplane, open the preferences and add your gMail accounts. Once all of your gMail accounts have been added to Mailplane, you can see in a glance how many unread messages are in each account each time you launch the application. This alone is worth the price of admission. To switch between accounts, all you have to do is double click on the account in the list and in seconds you are reading email.



Attaching files is as easy as drag and drop. You can drag your files and folders to Mailplane and watch them attach to the message and automatically upload. Pictures get automatically resized and optimized (you may adjust these setting in the preferences) to reduce the size of your message. There is also an iPhoto plugin that will allow you to mail images from iPhoto through Mailplane.

Mailplane comes with a built in screen shot application that will allow you to take a screen shot right from within the program. It's nice to not have to open another application to send a simple screen shot. The only drawback is that you do not get a chance to edit the image because it is automatically attached to a new outgoing mail message.



Other notable features include

• Some other features include:
• Growl notification
• Formatted signatures
• Apple's Address Book Integration
• Apple's Media Browser Integration

Mailplane gives me the Desktop application feel without compromising any of gMail's excellent web features. The Mailplane Single User License costs $24.95, a bargain for the amount of time I save.

Visit the Mailplane site for more info and videos.