Xoopit for Gmail is a free Firefox plugin that indexes and displays all of the attachments stored along with your messages. That means files, photos, videos, all immediately accessible from a simple search box based on the name of the sender or keyword. You don’t think that’s useful? Well it sure is if, like a lot of people, you’ve got 50,000 messages stacked up in your mail archive. Yeah try finding that file from 2 years ago now, eh?
It’s actually one of those applications that give you something back that you hadn’t realised you’d lost, control over your attachment history. It’s easy to forget that Gmail stores everything for ever, and that means most people have a huge number of files, photos and other interesting or important data just lying about on your mail server, waiting to be re-used or researched. It’s superb, and better still it fills in a gap in the Google mail service completely.
You also get a personal page with your data stored on the Xoopit servers, and you can use that as a secondary search area, but for most people the access via the Gmail inbox will be more than enough. Although the Xoopit page gives you some Flash games to play too. Excellent!
The only thing I would say is that suddenly the Gmail interface is in danger of becoming dangerously overcrowded, what with the cool add-on options from Google Labs you can install, and now this. If this carries on, soon we’re going to end up with a main page that looks like a Yahoo! portal. And that would never do, would it? Oh and by the way, Xoopit works in a similar way with Yahoo! mail too.
Xoopit allows you to search your stuff, not your messages. Xoopit upgrades Gmail search to show you the photos, videos and files that match what you are looking for. Browse photos and videos from YouTube, Flickr, Shutterfly, Kodak and Picasa. Links sent to you are automatically collected, saving you the hassle of going to these sites. Get out of Attachment Hell…easily find and access your files in Gmail. Never misplace an attachment again. All of these files and photos can be easily shared with friends, posted to your blog or shared on Facebook.