iPhone email app goes open source

In February, Google acquired the iPhone mail search app reMail, and promptly removed it from the App Store. On Friday, reMail developer Gabor Csell announced that the reMail codebase is now open source.

reMail provides a blazingly fast, impressively accurate search interface for Gmail and other IMAP email accounts. Or it did, until it was pulled from the store. Now, in theory, reMail, and its powerful functionality, can live again for those not lucky enough to own the app already. Cselle writes that his "hope is that developers interested in making email-related apps can use reMail code as a starting point."

So rather than some dark Google conspiracy to rid iPhone users of the pleasure of reMail, the acquisition was seemingly a talent focused one, bringing Cselle, a former engineering intern on Gmail, back into the Google fold.

The open source project is available on Google Code, under the Apache Licence 2.0.