MailBrowser is a new Gmail 3rd-party browser plugin that sits in the sidebar, giving you more information about your Gmail contacts. The plugin works by downloading a complete local copy of your email archive from Gmail over IMAP, then cross-referencing it to your Google Contacts in your Google account. I should state up front that the MailBrowser plugin is in beta, and likely to change.
MailBrowser for Gmail presents useful information about the contact you are viewing like a list of your last conversations with them, trending information about your communications with the contact, and fields so that you can add tags and notes to the contact in a very similar fashion to Xobni. It also attempts to look up the domain name of the contact and from there grabs information from the domain's website, which often turn out to be meta tags that are not all that useful. It would be nice if MailBrowser allowed you to choose the order it shows this information, or to hide sections entirely, because the most important information is hidden down at the bottom.
Beware: because (as mentioned above) MailBrowser works by downloading a copy of all of your emails, it will use up a significant amount of disk space.
It will probably take the plugin a few hours or even days to index your entire account, depending on how much email you have.
Don't worry if you have a personal Gmail account and a Google Apps account, since MailBrowser works for both, and it allows you to use more than one account at a time. Unfortunately, though it is able to look up the contact that initiated the thread you are currently viewing, it seems unable to intelligently choose which contact list to base its results returned on based on the email account you are viewing. This means that if you enable more than one account, any time you happen to have emailed someone from both of your accounts, you'll have to choose which one's contact list you want to view their information from. If it sounds a bit confusing, well, that's because it is.
One of Gmail's greatest features is its ability to thread conversations between multiple people about the same subject. Unfortunately, MailBrowser is only able to look up the contact for the person that initiated a thread, even though that may not be the one you need. It would be nice if you could look up someone else's contact info by clicking on their name or something similar, but as far as I can tell the only way to do it now is to type their name or email address into MailBrowser's search field.
Another gripe I have with MailBrowser is that, at least on the Firefox version I tested, the sidebar does not hide when I click away from my Gmail tab. While the contextual information is useful while viewing email, it's just in the way when I'm looking at a different website.
Aside from these complaints, MailBrowser looks like a useful free plugin that adds valuable information in a visible place in Gmail. It's available for Internet Explorer and Firefox on both Windows and Mac, though there are plans for a Chrome version in the future.
Tags: beta, contact list, ContactList, conversations, email, freeware, gmail, imap, mailbrowser, plugin, sidebar
Tumblr 101: Tips And Tricks To Get Started
WATCH: Shredding On The Google Guitar!
