Xoopit: It’s Like Having Your Own Gmail Bloodhound

Gmail has been both savior and demon for me. As the person who regularly gets the “you are over your email quota” emails on the free email account provided by my ISP, Gmail lets me go months without ever having to think about cleaning out my inbox. Of course, that means I go months without ever weeding through all the emails in there, and whether I hit a storage ceiling or not, it leads to one huge mess.

Gmail has an incredible search engine that allows me to find virtually any email I can remember receiving, which has saved the day more times than I care to think about, including the time my husband and I got lost on our way to a Halloween party and were able to pull up the emailed directions from the previous year (like I said, rarely weeding out). However, Gmail's built-in search only helps if I can remember at least one word in the email. For the countless attachments on saved emails (which is usually what I'm looking for), if I don't know the file name or who I sent an attachment to, odds are it's lost to me.

Enter Xoopit, a tool designed just for managing your Gmail account attachments. Using a Firefox plug-in, iGoogle gadget, or the web site itself, you provide Xoopit with your Gmail address and password and it hunts through your folders, gathering the photos, videos, and files attached to emails. As it promised, when I received the email letting me know that it was done crawling my email, I had a slew of forgotten images and documents, as well as videos I never remembered receiving. I could also sort by source (e.g. Flickr, Kodak Gallery, Picasa for photos), date, file size, file name, or type.

The current private beta only works for Gmail, but Xoopit promises upcoming support for Yahoo, Exchange, Hotmail, AOL, and .Mac. That's probably a good thing considering if Google decides that they like it, they'll build it in a week.