I’ve been using Gmail as my home mail client for a while now, and am quite happy with it (discussion available upon request). However, I own my own domain (hill-kleerup.org), and prefer to receive and send mail through that, so that I am not tied to any particular mail vendor or service.
Gmail lets me do that — polling my hill-kleerup.org mail to pull messages in, and sending messages out labeled as my hill-kleerup.org mail addy. However, because it’s being sent out through Google’s servers, some mail systems are kind of fussy about their mail headers, and will instead give the mail as being “From: myusername@gmail.com on behalf of myusername@hill-kleerup.org”.
Not all mail clients do that — in fact most don’t — but some do. Outlook, for one.
Google now has a setup where you can have it send its mail out through your domain’s own mail server (assuming it has one). It’s very easy to set up, and, from some quick testing, works like a champ.
So now I can send mail out from Gmail, and folks will have no idea that I’m not actually using Thunderbird on m own domain or sometihng. Or, rather, they won’t have to be worried about it one way or another — it will just show my hill-kleerup.org addy, regardless. Nice.
(Note to self: change Jim & Ginger’s setup to do this. Not high priority — can be done at the holidays.) (Note to self: change Margie’s setup to do this, too.)