AfterVictory.com

Around the holidays, we’re reminded that keeping in touch with people is very important.  Nothing makes keeping in touch with far away people easier then email (besides you know, the telephone. Work with me here).  It’s personal or impersonal, quick, and easy.

Once upon a time (~1998) I picked up a hotmail.com email address.  For a long time it was my only address and served my needs well.  It was easy to remember (first initial + last name, no numbers) and easy to tell others. It’s web-based interface made it easy to check from any old place that had the internets.

Hotmail has some downsides though.  It’s spam filtering is weak, and I get a lot of special offers from microsoft that I’m just not interested in.  For a long time they only gave you a very small storage space so I was constantly deleting old messages to make room for new messages and I had no way to save the old messages that I was deleting.  Some say that email is temporary and shouldn’t be saved, but some messages you just want to hang onto.  Perhaps that’s another post topic entirely.

Side story: In 2003ish I started using a second email address for freelance work. This was good because it kept all my freelance stuff seperate from my personal email.  It was bad because it was another address to remember to check and sort of confusing if the same person had both my addresses.   

I counted and think I’ve had (between work and life) around 8 different email addresses since I started college.

Anyhow, in 2005 I picked up a Gmail email account.  The kids at Google decided to sorta rethink the way people delt with and stored email.  No longer was I restricted to 10 measly megabytes of storage space like hotmail (Gmail offers 5+ gigabytes of storage) and now spam was esentially a thing of the past.  Almost everything about Gmail’s interface made silly tasks like attaching a file not such a herculean multi-screen effort.

Here are some of my favorite pieces of Gmail:

Gmail Supersweet Feature #1: Check other email account messages

I can now send and receive my freelance email account messages from within Gmail, saving me lot of time.  Gmail automatically picks up the messages from my freelance account and then sends selected messages as if they were coming from the freelance account.  This lets me keep seperate accounts still seperate but easy to access from a single account.  Gmail even automatically labels messages from other accounts so they’re easy to spot.

These labels (instead of traditional folders) let you assign short desriptions to messages that come in.  Gmail can even be set to assign them automatically.  For instance, every email I get from our credit card company gets the label of the card name and another label for finance.  Messages from my parents, sister, and Kate’s family all get automatically assigned a family label. 

I also have a filter set up that automatically pulls my work email, gives them a label, and then quickly removes them from my inbox into the account archive.  That way I can always get at my work email if I need it, but I never get bothered by/reminded of it at home. 

Gmail Supersweet Feature #2: Mail in the browser, mail in the client, all synced up (aka IMAP)

I use to use Outlook to check my freelance mail messages, and then I switched to Apple’s Mail.app client. I liked the email client feel of things, but hated backing up email and really despised not having my sent messages in Mail.app stay when I checked the messages in a web browser.

Along comes Gmail and their support for IMAP email syncing. Whatever I do in the web browser on the Gmail website automagically shows up when I use the Mail.app client, or Thunderbird or Outlook. Sent messages are always in a sent message folder, and labels are preserved (or displayed as folders). Thunderbird is excellent if you’re not tied to an Outlook office enviornment. It has nothing to do with this kind of Thunderbird though.

Gmail Supersweet Feature #3: Google Apps for Domains

Any time you sign up for a new domain name (say Rockland-ave.com, Firepizza.com, or even Northwoodsanimaltreats.com) you receive some kind of web-mail support.

The web-mail setup that came with Rockland-ave.com was particularly awful. It had no room for saved messages, leaving Kate with a lame email setup despite my best efforts. Along comes Google and their Apps for Domains offering. This, for free, runs all your domain’s email through Gmail.

This means that Kate gets to keep her email address and gets all the benefits of using Gmail (lots of space, spam filtering, etc).  I also have a Rockland-ave.com email address that I have automatically feed into my Gmail account.

So what does it all mean?  The kids at Google are working hard at making Email much easier on me.  With the impending birth of our first kid coming up in the next few months, I can’t wait to spend more time emailing news and photos to people and less time dealing with with the administration and technical details of email.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 23rd, 2007 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Nerdery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.