Gmail is a very useful web app

I know, I haven’t posted any blog entries in a while. Been busy like crazy with projects, and this time of year it’s even harder with the start of our Little League team and also all the yard work that has to be done early spring. At least tax season is behind us.

Anyway, let’s see...what’s the latest tech tip I can share with you? The coolest thing I’ve tried lately is Gmail’s

Here’s how I have mine set up. I’ve got Gmail configured to check my main two accounts via POP3, BUT leave messages on the server. That’s an important option, because that way messages will still download to my “main” tower system at home. If I didn’t tell Gmail to leave messages on the server, Gmail would download and remove them and they’d be unavailable to me on my main computer. That would be bad.

Gmail has lots of useful options for this, too - such as the ability to respond to somebody using the address they sent to originally. This cuts back on the confusion that can happen when somebody who emails you at one particular address and gets a reply from another. If you email me at vin@keystonewebs.com and I reply through Gmail, it should appear to come from keystonewebs.com.

Other Office-ey features include an address book, which you can populate from your Mac’s address book in a variety of ways, integration with Google calendar, and integration with Google Documents.

Oh, and it even has an out of office function which, after the next few hectic months, I’ll be ready to use when I take my vacation!

If you’re an email power user with multiple accounts, which you need to access from various locations while still preserving a “master” account somewhere,
Gmail is the way to go. It’s (naturally) free.

Oh geesh, I almost forgot the best thing about using Gmail this way - the iPhone! Gmail’s web interface on the iPhone is WAAAAY better, IMHO, than the dedicated mail app. multiple account features. This is the closest thing to Exchange functionality with Exchange and the expense it involved. If you’ve got multiple email accounts and struggle to find a way to access those accounts from multiple computers (from a remote office, or friend’s house, or wireless hotspot), this is the way to do it.