The future of G-Mail

A lot of praise and hope for the future

[digitalv]

I've been using GMail for a few months now and it's become my primary non-work e-mail address. I was never fond of web-based mail before, preferring the desktop delivery capabilities of Exchange/POP3 servers vs. having to go out looking to see if I got new mail.

The GMail Notifier changed all of that, and to me Gmail no longer "feels" like a web based mail service. As I jump computers more and more I'm finding Gmail to be the most convenient e-mail address. My biggest problem with POP3 is trying to remember whether I downloaded a particular message to the laptop, home, or office system. And when you use the "leave a copy of the message on the server" then you have to figure out whether you read and/or responded to the message or not on every machine you download your mail to. Who needs that mess?

Two things I would like to see added to GMail:

(1) The ability to create multiple e-mail aliases under a single account, and

(2) Once #1 exists, allow us to set up aliases using real domain names and point our MX records to Gmail.

With an alias option, message rules could be created to automatically apply labels based on the recipient. With an alternate domain option, I can tell you that I would move all of my business e-mail to Gmail immediately, and would happily pay a monthly or annual fee for such a service. I'm not talking about forwarding messages to my GMail account mind you, I mean having GMail actually host the mail for my domain name and logging in as [e-mail] instead of [e-mail]. And as for the ads, not only do they not bother me, but I actually like them.

The reason I haven't been on WebmasterWorld for a while is because I've been on the road again, I go RVing as often as possible and will disappear for a month or two at a time. I take the laptop with me, but I hate returning home and having a month's worth of e-mail marked "UNREAD" on my home and office computers even though I've already gone through it all on the laptop. Ugh!

Google - take my suggestions and run with them! :)

[Teknorat]

(2) Once #1 exists, allow us to set up aliases using real domain names and point our MX records to Gmail.

Yes please! :D

[paulroberts3000]

just set your domain to forward to [e-mail]

then set the reply to to your domain.

that's what I do and I don't think many people ahve noticed.

I would like to set the from to the domain though (as well as reply-to) and also the multiple reply address would be nice.

I have put it in as a request on the sugestion form
[services.google.com...]
if you want it I suggest you do as well.

a firefox extension for signatures would make me totally happy.

Paul

[semiprofessional]

Once they implement IMAP they will wipe the slate clean and will be a truly wonderful service. I might even consider paying for such a service if their IMAP support was good. Mind you, I have to wonder as IMAP will see just one huge folder so it might not be fast.