Making the Switch to Gmail

google is wonderful. Welcome to the gmail club!

I find Gmail unusable for work/personal mail. Messages sent directly to me get lost in the sea of incoming non-personal mail addressed to others, and its vaulted high speed search -- even filtering by automatically applied labels -- takes many seconds. I tried it out, and then went back to Apple Mail.app with a sigh of relief.

I use Gmail for mailing lists, but it's just not very well suited to tracking and acting on individual messages within the firehose of email that I manage each day.

Your mileage may vary.

I tried everything :) and Gmail was the first really usable and fun solution for email: - Archive instead of Delete - Spam filtering just works - Conversations are priceless - Labels instead of Folders - And searching: Gmail is like a huge database, each conversation has a URL...

If you miss all the nice Mac Desktop features: You may like Mailplane (http://mailplaneapp.com) to create attachments, take screenshots, get growl notifications, integrate with iLife, OmniFocus etc.

So: Gmail is good choice!

I switched from using Mail.app on Mac OS X to using only GMail's web-based interface a few years ago for personal email, and I haven't missed it one bit. I love having the same consistent interface for email on every computer anywhere. I don't have any trouble with usability in GMail, but then again, being a devotee of Getting Things Done, I have a fairly well evolved system in place to manage my stuff regardless of the system. My GMail inbox only contains email that I haven't yet processed; everything else is archived and easily searchable. I have a minimal set of labels for ongoing projects that have a large number of threads associated with them, but other than that, search is able to find everything I need.

Also, I should note that I'm using hosted GMail, so the MX servers for my domain are GMail servers, so that everything goes directly into GMail. This also gives me a nice web-based interface for managing all of my domain's email needs.

If there was a way for me to use GMail for work, I would! We're stuck with Outlook/Exchange unfortunately.

Ummm. Why does it have to be one or the other? I have mac.com and gmail.com addresses. I manage them in Mail.app on my Mac, and Thunderbird on the windoze machine at the office. Using IMAP (instead of POP), you store all the messages on the server, and access them through whatever client you want, even your phone.

As for the above comment about archive vs. delete. I can't stand that. That is what trash cans are for. I should be able to decide if an email is deleted. If I mistakenly delete one, I retrieve it from the trash. If I empty the trash, those emails should be GONE FOREVER.

There is a great thread about getting GMail to play nice with Mail.app, iPhone, Thunderbird, etc here. It took me a while to get GMail to work the way I wanted it to on Mail.app, but now I couldn't be happier.

I use Gmail for my personal stuff and LOVE IT. I just love the tagging/labels system instead of folders, because sometimes one thing goes in multiple places! You can also filter emails from certain senders, etc to go into a label. I know most mail programs do that too, but I like accessing it from my phone, from any computer.. makes me happy. I haven't tried to use it for iMarc stuff yet, but that's really only because I want to keep work and personal stuff seperate, so I'm just using Mail on my mac here at work. I really ought to organize it better though, and I loathe the search function. Ah well.