Switching to Gmail
I've just done it. I've left the ranks of those five people who still don't have Gmail.
I've been using IMAP with Snappermail for the last year or so and I think that I've had a pretty good system going. With my system, processing the same emails multiple times was kept to a minimum, but I still found myself bumping up on my server storage limit all the time. I would regularly archive my email to my PC and I rarely managed to keep more than a couple months of email online.
I've been toying with making the switch for some time now, especially since Google has made it very easy to disguise outgoing email as coming from my old email address (I own and use my own domain name; more on that later). But, naturally, the compelling reason to switch is all that storage space (7+ gigs is a darn sight more than the 100 megs I'm paying for now). Being onboard the Google train, should I decide to switch to Android in a year, doesn't hurt either.
I have near 13 years of email archived on my PC, made possible by the best, most robust, and longest running email app out there: Pegasus Mail. Sadly, development on Pegasus has slowed tremendously, and I find myself using it less and less. It's not pretty, has some slightly annoying quirks with IMAP, stands alone (and thus doesn't share contacts, etc. with Google, Palm, Exchange, etc.) and runs pretty slowly. The search algorithm is painfully slow and I dread having to use it.
Fortunately, bringing all (or most, anyway) of that archived mail to Gmail is easily enough achieved by uploading it with IMAP. Unfortunately, at least for the moment, there's a catch. Gmail datestamps the uploaded mail with the time it arrived on the server. The original datestamp isn't lost, but Gmail doesn't sort or search using it. Since this is a known issue, I genuinely hope it'll be resolved. In the mean time, I have 13 years of email appearing as though it arrived in the last 3 days. This is going to complicate my mobile email for the next month or so (since Snapper will want to sync all the server mail in the last month, which will total around 11-12 thousand messages). For others planning to migrate their email, try Thunderbird. Apparently it dodges this particular bullet. Or check out some of Google's migration tools, which I didn't discover until after I uploaded all my mail using Pegasus and IMAP.
Other than this one issue, I'm liking Gmail quite a bit. Gmail does certain things differently from other email providers and clients, which has required some adjustment on my part. With such a long standing history of archiving mail into folders, it's a little disorienting that Gmail doesn't. Instead, it uses a combination of Labels and Searches. Labels are, for the most part, equivalent to folders, with the exception that a message may have many labels. Your labels appear as IMAP folders, which makes managing them from Snapper relatively easy. It's taken a little getting used to the idea that I don't need a label in place of every folder I had before. For instance, I really don't need to label all the email from my dad, 'Dad.' I can simply run a search on his email address and it'll all appear. The Quick Links panel (found in Labs) makes managing these searches pretty handy. Searches, and, for that matter, everything else are lightening fast. They're so fast that, especially in conjunction with previews of attachments, I really can't imagine a good reason for me to use an email client on my PC anymore.
The 'Conversations' feature, which displays emails as threaded conversations is fantastic. At a glance, it's easy to tell which messages provoked a long exchange and it's much more convenient than quoted text in each new email. I wish Snappermail could take advantage of this feature. But the more attached I get to it, the stronger pull Android will likely have on me.
Another big plus to Gmail is support for mobile browsers. Having 13 years of email on the server doesn't do me that much good if I can't search through it from my Centro. Fortunately, the mobile formatted version does a great job with search and a decent job with other mail features. Naturally, I'd love a full featured email app like Snapper, but I'll settle for Blazer when I need to do searches. And I've upped the ante by tying my Gmail search to Initiate's bookmarks. I created a bookmark for Gmail that can start a search directly from Initiate, then added that bookmark to my favorites. Now when I need to track down an email, I just tap the 'Gmail (search)' icon, enter my search string and hit OK. A few seconds later and my results are displayed in Blazer. Awesome! Take it a step further and 'Star' the emails you need, and you can pull them up quickly and easily in Snapper.
I was also pleasantly surprised to find that Gmail appears to have learned how to sort some of my incoming mail. I have a forwarding address that I BCC all my outgoing mail to, so that it's easy for me to archive all my sent mail. Gmail has apparently learned to mark these messages as read and stick them in my Sent Mail folder. I don't know if I just got lucky, or what, but until the sorting AI becomes self-aware, downloads itself into a giant robot and attacks Tokyo, I'll happily let it continue the good work.
As I mentioned earlier, I own my own domain. Gmail can take advantage of this in two ways. The free and easy way is to tell Gmail to pretend to send mail from your other address. Ask your email host/provider to forward all incoming email to your Gmail account, and few people will ever be able to tell the difference. The other, more robust option is to let Gmail handle all the email routing for your domain. This (probably) requires a Google Premier account, which costs $50/year.
Understanding what Google does and doesn't provide for you, and exactly what steps you'll need to take to get it, is paradoxically poorly documented. One the one hand, there's a delightful side-by-side comparison of free and Premier Google services. On the other, without a lot of searching through the help database, it's very hard to tell what any of it means. Here's what I've discovered so far: Google is not a domain host. If you own a domain, or want to buy one, Google will not be the entity that handles any of that business for you. They'll send you to a recommended hosting company, if you like, but they don't register or host your domain. If you want Google to handle your mail, you'll have to make some changes to the email routing with your domain host. Google provides some instructions on this, but you may not be able to make the changes by yourself.
Why would you want Gmail to handle all of the email for your domain? Well, besides having mail truly originate from your me@mydomain.net address, it will also give you access to administrator privileges with Gmail. Chief among these is the ability to manage addresses and mailboxes on your domain. You also get access to some advanced email migration tools. For the time being, I'm not sure that I really need any of these features. But if I wanted to host and administer multiple seperate @mydomain mailboxes, lots of forwarding addresses, or migrate multiple mailboxes, Premier would be the way to go.
So far, my Gmail experience has been far more positive than I expected. My only complaint is not having switched sooner.
