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. »