I finally made the switch. After reading a Lifehacker article which included a poll showing the vast majority of readers use GMail over a desktop application, I decided to peruse the comments and try to figure out exactly why.
One of the first comments that caught my eye was that you could in fact use external email (me@place.com) inside Gmail. Not just forwarding, but full sending and receiving. This definitely intrigued me, and I’m not sure why I didn’t investigate this further before. In a few minutes I was able to setup all three of my email accounts (main, spam, and work) in Gmail.
So why actually use Gmail now that I had access to my main email through it? Well, at work I use Thunderbird, which I’m pretty happy with. It’s a bit dull, but it gets the job done. It does have one feature that I can’t stand however: When you reply to a forward, it sends the reply not to the person who sent you the forward, but to the original author of the email. So if someone forwards you an email saying “Haha, let’s laugh at this person’s email” and you hit reply – guess what, you just sent your reply to the person you were making fun of!
At home I use Outlook, and am pretty tired of it. No matter what I do, it feels ridiculously sluggish, and can take nearly two minutes to load and download new email. Is it that much to ask for access to my email archives without having to wait several minutes for the program to load, and then another minute for navigation or searches?
Not with Gmail. I can’t say enough how refreshing it is to open a browser and have access to my inbox in 5 seconds, and search results for whatever I want in another 5 seconds after that. Other benefits include the ease of accessing my email anywhere (I went through the process of setting up SMTP for this purpose, but I still lacked a decent web interface), excellent spam protection, and an intuitive interface.
My point is: If you haven’t ever tried using GMail as your email hub, give it a whirl. I never thought I would leave the desktop, and yet one day later Thunderbird and Outlook have yet to be opened.
See, I always kept Thunderbird around as a backup just in case I jump ship off of Gmail to something else. So far, I’m not really sure that I will though.
Yeah, that was my biggest hesitation. I still use Thunderbird at work for that very reason – I can’t really say “Sorry boss, Google is down, no can do!”
I haven’t really looked at Gmail’s exporting capability, but I hope that if I ever did decide to switch I could export all my email history.
[...] really like the concept, and realize that I actually declared myself email bankrupt in my recent move to Gmail, as described in a comment I posted at Web Worker [...]
Doesn’t Outlook show your Gmail account when sending email from another email address (x on behalf of y)?
My reason for switching to Gmail was Google Apps (http://www.google.com/a). If you have a domain, you are able to really send email from that domain. And there are many other features in the Apps package.
The only downside: mailbox size stuck at 2 GB and Gmail notifier doesn’t work yet. Well, I can live with that…
Yes, it does. Unfortunately that was one of the discoveries I made early on. I actually had to create a new GMail account because of it, as my GMail name wasn’t exactly something I wanted appearing along with my real email.
For that reason alone, I wouldn’t use GMail for business purposes, as it seems a bit unprofessional. Besides that though, I can deal with it for all other communication.
I saw Google Apps as well, it looked interesting but couldn’t exactly tell what the advantage was if I was the only one using that domain.
I agree though, a 2gb limit is plenty for me.
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