GMAIL the Great

February 25, 2007

I have always had a lot of time for GMAIL and think Google really has got it just right (nearly) and it only seems to be getting better. This weekend I inquisitively clicked on the 'new features' link "“ to my delight GMAIL's new service offers the facility to check the mail you receive from other email accounts and even reply from those accounts.

This feature has two obvious great benefits:

The ability to check all your email accounts from one location. I for one have a gmail, hotmail and work email account "“ so this in itself is very useful. No flaws there!

The second, the ability to send an email from one location, for all your email accounts. This sounds awesome, but there are a couple of flaws that question my 'GMAIL the Great' post title.

The major flaw lies in the fact that GMAIL is sending an email on behalf of your other email accounts. This results in some instances of the receiver of an email seeing the “From customaddress@domain.com on behalf of yourusername@gmail.com.” as the sender field. This for me lowers the trust bar for the receiver regarding your email as being genuine.

The reason Google does this is to help combat against SPAM and although I understand the reason why, I have found emails sent this way, landing in my Outlook SPAM folder, so again there is a trust issue.

Although that aside, GMAIL gets another big thumbs up and it is definitely continuingly to move forward! I also recently discovered that you can add an HTML & image signature which great for Publicising your blog in emails.

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.