[tweetmeme]I’m addicted to email. Back in 2005, when I first changed sides from a @yahoo.co.in email address to the exclusively-beta gmail.com, I was blown away with what I was presented with. 5 years later, today, Google’s email service is arguably the most widely used and feature-packed free email service on the planet. Over the past five years, I’ve grown increasingly fond of the interface tweaks and feature additions Google has been adding to its service. Moreover, I have pretty much adapted my workflow to make use of all the nifty features that the Web UI offers. Exceptional fast searching, labels, archiving and filters changed the way I (and most people) use email. If all this wasn’t enough, Google came ahead and launched Google Apps, a service that let us use all of the features of Google Email (and other services), but using our own domain, for free. The fact that Google Apps offered a dead simple way to manage your business email, all while having the same awesome features (and more) from Gmail, was enough for me to start using Google Apps for almost all of the domains I’ve bought over these years.

A major part of my email workflow today is made possible by two components – 1. Google Email and 2. Mailplane. Believe it or not, Mailplane on my Mac handles 34 different email accounts*. Yes, I do use Mail.app as well, but that’s only to house my MobileMe account. It’s very difficult for me to resist choosing Google as my email service, if given a choice.

Two years ago, when I bought the first-generation iPhone, it had the best mobile email client I had used on any phone. We’ve seen it improve over the different firmware versions Apple has released, but even today, at 3.1.3, it hasn’t come anywhere close to the fantastic feature-set of Gmail’s web interface, even the one optimized for the iPhone. Unlike Apple, who only brought us a half-assed search implementation in Mobile Mail, Gmail’s iPhone-optimized interface continues to bring new features to the table using some of the advanced HTML5 technologies today. So even on the iPhone, I only have MobileMail set to use my MobileMe account and my Smoking Apples’ email account via IMAP. But I wanted something better, since this was nothing but a compromise.

A month ago, Dave sent me the working prototype of an app he was working on at Indyhall. The moment I read his one-word description of the app as ‘Mailplane’ for iPhone, I knew exactly what to expect. Codenamed ‘MultiG’ back then, the app was a cocoa wrapper built around Gmail’s iPhone optimized web UI, but with multiple account support. Since then, it has changed the way I do email on my iPhone. But how good can a mere native wrapper around a web UI be? Read on.

In the last four weeks, Dave has been adding features to the app and thanks to the recent speed-up of App Store approvals, the app now sits at version 1.2. I’ve been beta testing the app since version 1.0 and Dave has managed to impress us testers with every new addition.

Multi-account Support

Mailroom supports multiple email accounts (both Gmail and Google Apps), much like the same way Tweetie handles multiple twitter accounts. There’s a pseudo-dashboard containing the list of all the accounts set up in the app, along with a count of unread emails in each account. However, Mailroom brings two different kinds of counts for each account, which has never been seen in any other email client before, dubbed as TrueNew count.

Personally, I hate unread counts. Much like Alex, I hate to keep anything unread. Whenever I’m mobile, any email that comes in and can be acted upon, I will do that and send it to the archives. The ones that I cannot take care of, I keep them unread as a reminder that I need to get things done as soon as possible. So I consider email unread counts as tasks on a Todo list which other people add.

Mailroom introduces a feature dubbed as TrueNew, wherein along with the total unread count in that account, it will also show a count of new emails that have come in since the time you last checked the account, i.e the ones that matter. Simple. Effective. Genius.

Address Book Integration

Mailroom also integrates your iPhone address book into the app. So when composing an email any of the Google accounts you’re logged in to, you can not only insert email addresses from your Google contacts, but also pull up your Address Book. By default, Gmail’s UI only shows the To: field, so Mailroom will automatically insert the email addresses directly to that field. If, however, you have also enabled the CC: and BCC: fields, Mailroom is nifty enough to ask you where you want to add the email address to.

Offline Access

Thanks to HTML5, Mailroom has the ability to work offline. Mailroom retains a local database / cache of your accounts, so if and when you lose coverage (Hello, AT&T), you can still browse around in your accounts. Not only can you search and read emails, Mailroom also lets you compose a new one. This is stored as a draft that is sent out once you get back on the network.

For this to work, however, you must have logged in to each of the accounts at least once. Mailroom is smart here as well. On the Accounts list screen, when in offline mode, it will only display “dive-in” arrows for those accounts that can be accessed offline.

Other features

Mailroom has an option to remember the last account you were in, so if, for any reason, you had to leave the app, launching it back again takes you where you left off. There’s also a Orientation lock for portrait mode lovers like me. For those you like unread counts as badges on your icons, you have the option of choosing which unread count to display – TrueNew or the total unread count. It’s also got an integrated browser, for viewing web links as well as any of the natively supported file formats like PDFs and Microsoft Word documents.

Version 1.2, which was released a few days ago, brought some visual tweaks and the ability to view HTML email messages and images inline in the email.

What’s missing

There’s a lot more that Mailroom can do and Dave and his team of minions are on their feet going through feedback from the users and testers and implementing them in iterative releases. However, much of the limitations in the App are because of the iPhone SDK.

Currently, Mailroom cannot technically fetch emails in the background, so one has to has to launch the app to check for any new emails or update the badge count. To work around this, Mailroom can work along with Push services such as Prowl and Boxcar. Of course, you have to either give out your email address and password for this to work or forward your emails to a certain unique address. So if you’re as paranoid about security as me, you can only hope that iPhone OS 4.0 brings some background goodness.

The iPhone OS also has no way of specifying the default Email client, so all mailto: links open up in Mail. Mailroom does offer a mailroom:// protocol handler, which is how the push services work with the app.

You can also not share Photos or Videos taken on your iPhone with Mailroom. Moreover, the iPhone optimized web UI that Gmail offers does not let you paste HTML content into it, so copying the media from the Photos app is no good either.

Mailroom primarily seems to be targeted at business email customers. If you have more than one Google email accounts and actively use them, getting Mailroom on your iPhone is a no-brainer. Available at $2.99 on the App Store, Mailroom has changed the way I use email on my iPhone.