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Feb 12

Gmail the client…. close but no cigar

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Bob posted on Not At the Mercy of Gmail in which he talks about Gmail being an email client.

I have been thinking about using Gmail for just that, as I am not really happy with any desktop client at the moment.

It is a shame, as I really do want a killer desktop client that does everything I want, and I have no need for email to be web based. Just because I run ajaxian.com doesn’t mean I want everything Ajax ;)

There is a middle ground too of course. I can route my email to gmail, and then have my client get the email via POP, so I can choose my view (and at least have access to email when on a plane / offline!).

The one reason why GMail isn’t there for me is that if Bob emails me from his domain it shows up as:

Bob Lee [[email protected]] on behalf of Bob Lee [[email protected]]

Far from transparent :)

I wouldn’t want “[email protected] on behalf of …” if I am using Apple Mail as a client.

That is one reason why I still use Yahoo! Mail for my online needs. They let me setup my From so it is transparent.

As seen here:

boblee.jpg

20 Responses to “Gmail the client…. close but no cigar”

  1. Bob Lee Says:

    What are you talking about? I just tried sending to two different accounts and it says “from Bob Lee ” at both. I don’t see “nutter” anywhere.

  2. John Wilson Says:

    I don’t think Bob has his GMail account set up the same as mine. When I send an email from an account which has been set up to come from a non GMail address it looks just fine (I’m using Apple Mail too)

    I’ll send you an email and we can see if it look OK on your client.

  3. Bob Lee Says:

    Make that “from Bob Lee <crazybob at crazybob dot org>”. Your blog dropped my ‘<…>’ in the first comment.

  4. Bob Lee Says:

    Are you talking about setting the “reply-to” address? Is that what your email client displays when the “reply-to” and “from” addresses differ? Gmail lets you change the actual “from” address now.

  5. eu Says:

    For the record, GMails POP3 is better then nothing, but it is really sucks. You can’t actually use it from multiple local clients, once message is touched from one of the clients all others won’t see it. It is also quite unusual to have “sent” item in the same incoming folder. I wonder if Google ever going to provide real IMAP interface, especially with their new domain hosting… Then it would be really ideal.

    By the way, Dion, what exactly you are unhappy with in existing desktop email clients?

  6. Bob Lee Says:

    For the record, the screenshot was posted after my previous comments. ;)

    Sane email clients use the “from” header in lieu of the “sender” header. The important thing for me is that everyone has the correct address in their address books.

    I’m not sure how I feel about spoofing the “sender” header. At the very least it would break DomainKeys (http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys), right? Then again you say Yahoo makes it completely transparent. Is this the free or premium version?

  7. Bob Lee Says:

    eu, Is there a way to reliably support multiple POP3 clients at all? Sounds more like a protocol issue to me. Does Yahoo in their premium service?

  8. MikeInAZ Says:

    Gmail for domains is in beta:

    https://www.google.com/hosted/Home

    microsoft has one too, called live…but I don’t like it at all.

    https://domains.live.com/

  9. eu Says:

    Bob, I don’t think there is and that is why Google shouldn’t of bothered with POP3 and provide IMAP in the first place and do the mapping of GMail tags to IMAP folders. That would be really handy. You should know better who is responsible for not providing us this killer feature! :-)

  10. Todd Huss Says:

    I would enjoy switching to GMail for my full-time needs but I have yet to find an import and export facility that goes from my current MBox format into Gmail keeping folder/tag assignments and then lets me also export again in the same manner if I want to switch to another service. I want the choice to switch (which is the most important thing a service can offer) but as long as Google offers one of the best email interfaces I’m happy to let them show me contextual ads all day in exchange for the service.

    I think Google doesn’t offer IMAP because it would be very attractive for many users to just use GMail as their IMAP server. If Google isn’t showing ads then they aren’t making any money by having you as a user.

  11. j Says:

    Eugene, the behavior you describe is due to POP3, not GMail.

    Dion, I really don’t see what the problem is. Okay, GMail is mentioned in the headers, but who cares? If people respond, they will respond to your cloaked address, not to GMail. I use GMail everywhere, yet nobody ever uses (or knows of) my GMail address.

    And actually, there are people who care about this header thing: spammers. If you’re wondering why 99% of the emails that go through Yahoo are spams while GMail has close to 0%, you know why.

  12. Bob Lee Says:

    eu, Only so much time in a day, and IMAP is very complex and resource intensive. I’d love it, too!

  13. eu Says:

    Bob, I thought Google got used to solve complex tasks and also has unllimited resources. Besides, even JBoss guys wrote email server and I would be surprised if Google wouldn’t be able to. ;-)

    J, I know that it is POP3, but it is still no use. Perhaps only for backups.

  14. Bob Lee Says:

    eu, Ha ha, somehow I don’t think Andy’s mail server would meet our scalability requirements.

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