I had originally outsourced my e-mail service because the mail service that came with my Web hosting account had no spam filtering. This arrangement worked well enough, but then along came Google's Gmail.

The opportunity now was to fire up my hosting account e-mail and have Gmail retrieve my messages allowing me to take advantage of Gmail’s excellent spam filtering and searching knowing that should Gmail become unavailable, my messages would just accrue in my hosting account.

What I hadn’t expected was just how much I would fall in love with Gmail. Gmail’s filtering is outstanding and the fact that you get POP, SMTP, and IMAP thrown in is amazing! But there’s one feature that if it isn’t at the top of my list by itself is at least equal to the top choice, and that’s searching.

Gmail’s searching beats every other search tool I’ve tried with Outlook. But there’s a problem. Gmail searching is effective by keywords and all of the attributes of SMTP-formatted e-mail. What it doesn’t allow you to do is search efficiently through attachments and for embedded content that is not text.

Then I stumbled upon Xoopit. Xoopit is a Firefox plugin for Gmail that indexes the images, videos, and attachments to your messages and displays and sorts them. It can help if you're looking for that ZIP file you know is there but you don’t remember it’s correct name or who sent it to you. Xoopit makes it incredibly easy to find pretty much anything that Google can’t find.

When you find what you’re looking for, you can then share it directly from the Xoopit user interface, delete it, or download it. You can also click on the sender’s name to see all content from that person or click on the subject of the message to open that e-mail.

Xoopit provides a gadget for iGoogle that allows you to browse the images in your e-mail as well as the previously mentioned Firefox plugin that creates a Xoopit toolbar in Gmail.

You can either use the Xoopit toolbar and stay within Gmail, or you can log in to the Xoopit site and browse your Gmail content from there.

Xoopit currently only works with Gmail support for Yahoo, MSN Hotmail, AOL, and .Mac are reputedly in the works.

Did I mention that Xoopit is free? This is an outstanding service that I now think I couldn’t live without – it’s just too damn useful.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.