I like web-based solutions for most everything, but I’ve never been a huge fan of web-based email apps. The ubiquitous SquirrelMail, which is provided by my current host (and the last two, come to think of it) is not bad, but its lack of an auto-save/auto-draft feature doesn’t lend it to the composition of long emails (unless you want to risk losing them).
Like everyone else and his dog, I’ve been trying out Gmail for quite a while now. At first, I used it mostly as a poor-man’s FTP client. If I had a huge attachment that I knew my own host would block, I’d send it to my Gmail account and then download it from there to the target machine. Likewise, if I knew someone was going to send me a huge attachment, I’d have them send it to Gmail rather than to my “real” email account–to save the file storage space.
But the thing that kept me from migrating entirely to Gmail was that I already had an established email addresss with my own domain name. Call it branding. Call it convenience, but I’ve been wheat at wheatdesign dot com for a long time now. Becoming something else just didn’t seem like an option. And having your own domain also means you can set up email aliases. So, for situations where using my nickname would seem unprofessional, I’m also james dot martin at wheatdesign dot com. I didn’t want to lose that flexibility either. Setting all of them up to forward to my Gmail account is simple enough, but the replies would still be coming from this strange new address.
Then the sky cracked open and the powers that be at Google introduced the killer feature which makes it possible for me to move entirely to Gmail: the ability to send emails from other email addresses. What? How’s that, now? It’s simple, really. Any email address that you have access to can be set up in Gmail as an alternate “from” address. You enter the addresses, Gmail sends an email to the new “from” address to make sure you really own it, you confirm by following a link or returning to Gmail and entering a code. And all is done. Now, when you compose, you have a popup box to select from your available “from” addresses. You can set the “reply to” fields as you like.
So, in my case, a lot of my mail is still going through my (web-host-provided) mail server. But, from there, it gets forwarded on to Gmail. The major upside is I only have to deal with one web-based email interface, and Gmail’s is tops in that regard. Gmail also has an auto save feature and very good spam blocking. So I think I’ve found a solution that works for me. And I might never need a desktop email client again.