Tip: Using Gmail for all your e-mail addresses

Being a small happy company, we shunned anything “enterprisey” like Outlook/Exchange and have been happy with POP3 accounts and the freedom of using whatever mail client for our e-mail needs. However, our POP3 accounts’ webmail (SquirrelMail) left much to be desired in a web-based e-mail system.

Gmail introduced a new feature last week allowing you to add multiple e-mail “personalities” so that you can send e-mail as you@whateverdomain.com from Gmail. The real charm of this functionality is that you can now use Gmail as your web-based e-mail client for ALL your e-mail accounts transparently.

Why would you want to do such a thing?

  • To get a better web-based interface for handling your e-mail accounts
  • Consolidate your e-mail reading to one place, one login
  • Securely read and send e-mails since Gmail uses SSL
  • Take advantage of Gmail’s excellent spam filtering

Upon discovering the Gmail’s capability of allowing me to add different send from addresses, I added both my work and personal e-mail addresses. After confirming I am the owner of those accounts, I was on my way to writing e-mail from either of those addresses! To round out using Gmail as my web-mail app, I logged into our Dreamhost control panel and set direct forwards for my two email addresses to pass-along e-mails to my Gmail account in addition to the POP accounts. Now I was able to read all my incoming e-mails for work/personal by simply logging into Gmail! Save for a few minor header info in the message, the recepient of my e-mails would not even know that the e-mails were sent from Gmail, therefore maintaining my professional and personal identity.

Now employ good management style with Gmail’s labels, and you have a very clean way to manage your e-mail in one place. And with Google’s fresh Mac OS X Gmail notifier, I’m good to go without having to open an e-mail client all day.

Posted on 04 September 2005 by danny, in Technology

2 Comments

  1. Dev Purkayastha  / 08 September 2005

    That’s a pretty killer feature, and will do a lot to get more people using Gmail for their main client. The only reason I’m thinking of switching my email away from Gmail is (1) the lack of easy backup of my emails, and (2) Mail.app (for the Mac) is pretty sweet in itself.

    Kellan is surprisingly of a different opinion on this:
    http://laughingmeme.org/archives/003088.html#003088

  2. d.wen  / 08 September 2005

    Mail.app is pretty sweet indeed. But you can also keep using Mail by enabling POP service on your Gmail account. What is also convenient is that Gmail will send you copies of messages you sent via Gmail so you can also keep a copy for your records in your Sent mailbox. Just set up an additional rule and it filters to its right place.

    And I think enabling POP also lets you be in control of your backup. You’ll be downloading all your messages to your machine locally and you can do what you want with your mailboxes then.

    The spam filtering could be a bit harsh on Gmail, but I was under the assumption that Gmail simply hasn’t learned my “whitelist” yet. Hopefully with more use, it will be better with incoming e-mails from friends who I’ve sent e-mails to before!

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