We all want access to our email these days from where ever we may be. Many moons ago, I had a MS Exchange server running Outlook Web Access at home that was exposed to the net. No matter where I was, I could access my box at home.
The problem with this is that you have to maintain your own infrastructure. I'm not sure if I can be bothered... especially that my number one problem is spam. My 30 day spam count is about 1000 messages. My 30 day non-spam count is about 60 messages. Wheat from the chaff, baby.
I was a fairly early adopter of Gmail, and it's number one feature in my books is spam filtering. Numerous other products and services I'd tried didn't come close to the quality of Gmail's filtering. In the years I've been using it, I've only had a couple of false positives. Spam had previously destroyed the usefullness of email for me. Gmail has recovered it.
Gmail recently introduced my number two feature... IMAP. That's right connect your MS Outlook to your Gmail account. You've now got an Online & Offline solution.
GMail's number three feature has been around a little while... "another email address". You can send and recieve email for another domain via your Gmail account. You can add "myaccount@mydomain.com" to your Gmail account, and direct mail to Gmail's servers. Once verified, you can send email from "myaccount@mydomain.com" from your Gmail account. The only catch is differing "From:" and "Sender:" headers giving recipients from descriptors like: "FSmith@gmail.com on behalf of Fred Smith [Fred.Smith@mydomain.com]". I've already had people question it... too confusing for Joe Average.
Here's my setup. My own domain's email goes to my Gmail account.
My machine - 99% of the time: I access my email on Gmail using Outlook via IMAP. Using Outlook I send my email via a separate SMTP server (avoiding the "on behalf of" issue).
Another machine - 1% of the time: I access my email on Gmail using Gmail Web. Using Gmail Web I send my email (and accept the "on behalf of" issue).
I love Google...
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