Online Life Tool: Gmail

Replaces: Outlook (and the associated old-school mail servers)

As you read through this series of articles you will find that I depend on Google for a lot of functionality. The primary reason I chose Google springs from the great approach to online e-mail that they pioneered, Gmail. With virtually unlimited storage and the recommendation that you archive instead of delete messages you have only yourself to blame if an important e-mail goes missing. If you are careful you will find that you can find anything you need very, very quickly using their approach to categorizing and filing messages. Of course, all of this and more has been said before about Gmail, so I’ll stop the fan-boy praise and get to the nitty gritty.

I use Google’s Apps for your Domain for all of my e-mail needs. The great thing is that all of my sites and e-mail addresses can play together nicely because of Google’s “share and share alike” approach to their services. So using Google Apps is equivalent to having a Google account (which anyone can get for free). For most of these services, their web based interface is way up the list of good web-based applications and while their e-mail interface is definitely no exception.

While it would be easy for me to assume that people reading this story, owning and iPhone and wanting to live an Online Life would be able to set up e-mail without assistance, we all know what happens when we assume. So here’s how I roll in regards to e-mail:

1. Get a Gmail account
2. Register your Gmail account on your iPhone
3. Learn to deal with the envy of your peers

So just use the IMAP client on the iPhone to connect to your Gmail account. The two synchronize beautifully (much better than with my Windows Mobile phone) and working between them is really transparent.

If you want to label and archive something via your iPhone, just drag it to one of your “folders” and presto chango Gmail will handle the rest for you. When you set up your account your iPhone automatically added a special set of folders which have a [Gmail] folder as their parent. These folders allow you to do all of the special things Gmail’s web interface allows you to do. For example, if you want to “star” an item, simply place it in the [Gmail] > Starred folder. All of the special folders work the same and with them you have all the tools you need to keep your inbox in order quickly and easily. If you’re like me, with time you’ll find yourself using your iPhone for all of your e-mail related tasks even when you’re sitting right in front of a computer!

For an obligatory comparison, this approach replaces Outlook for me. While I don’t have many complaints about Outlook at all, it really is very nice to be able to have all of my messages stored on the web instead of in an archive file on my hard drive. Now that I’m using this approach I can’t count the number of times I have been out and wanted to pull up an e-mail. If I were still tethered to Outlook (without a mobile device) that wouldn’t be possible and even with a mobile device (Outlook works pretty well with any Windows Mobile device as well as the iPhone) if I hadn’t synced lately I would be out of luck.

Something else to remember that I will definitely be mentioning more later is that almost all web-based applications support some sort of interaction via e-mail. Because the SMTP (e-mail) standard is so widely accepted, having a good e-mail client is paramount to achieving any goal as an Online Lifer (woot, I just made up that term, I Googled it to be sure).

So on the e-mail front I would say that not only have I been happy with my new approach, it has been better than I realized it could be which in the end is what we should all hope for when we try something new.