Weblogsky: Email and Gmail

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Email and Gmail

By way of followup to my "Outlook vs Thunderbird" rant: after traveling with my laptop and suffering long email downloads, it struck me that Gmail might be the right solution, so I started forwarding my primary mail stream to that account. Result was pretty good, actually, but I found some deal breakers:

You can't paste rich content into Gmail and send it as an html mail, something I need to do for some of the lists I manage. (You can create html emails in Gmail, but only using Gmail editing tools.)
Gmail lets you set up any email address as your reply-to, so I could continue to send emails as though from my primary address. However lists where I subscribed with that address wouldn't accept my message if they were set up for member posts only. This is because the better list management systems know not to look at your reply-to, which you can always manipulate... it looks at a sender address that's elsewhere in the header and usually not visible or accessible to the user. I was therefore going to have to change addresses in a bunch of lists to continue using Gmail.

This is too bad, because it was pretty cool opening a browser and having my mail there all up to date and ready to read. I'm back in Outlook, but I think I'll forward to Gmail again when I'm traveling and leave with the inability to reply to lists for a few days.

I'm also using Google Calendar instead of Outlook's... it's a little easier to use but they haven't worked out data sync yet. An easy sync with Outlook or Palm, either one, would be handy.

jon posted this at 9:40 PM
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Comments

I run my own servers off of a few static IPs at my
house, and recently this very same email issue has become something I've
been very interested in. Anyhow, I finally moved up and upgraded my
mail server to include support for IMAP. As you might know pop mail is
downloaded from the server and subsequently deleted, with IMAP on the
other hand everything stays on the server (very much like a Gmail
account). So in effect my thunderbird on my linux box can read, compose
and answer the same mail as my apple laptop, all sent messages and
received messages are retained on the server and stay in sync regardless
of the client I'm using. And if I need to access my mail from a random
net-capable computer I even have squirrel mail set up so that I can do
just that. Which is even more like Gmail. Also of note, if you're using linux there is a very promising outlook clone called Evolution. Most of the feature you named in your previous blog on the subject seem to be there, but I'm new to evolution and it's been years since I've touched a microsoft product of any sort.

Posted by: Josh Cox | May 18, 2006 10:24 AM

Gmail will let you send email from any address you control. Go to Settings > Accounts, and "Add another email address". Gmail sends a verification email to that address, you click a link to add the address, and there will be an option to change the sender address of each mail you send, plus you can select any of your addresses as default for sender and/or reply-to.

Posted by: punkteleos | May 21, 2006 5:11 PM

I don't see any way in gmail to set a different sender address. Changes I make only modify the reply-to. Return-path and sender still have my gmail address.

Posted by: Jon Lebkowsky | May 22, 2006 8:14 AM