I use Google Apps as my e-mail service for gaelicWizard.net. Here’s why and what-for.

Gmail

Gmail is almost the best e-mail service ever. This is not actually saying much, though. Most e-mail systems merely replicate a directory tree. A directory tree is just not a good way of storing human-centric information. Gmail ditches this. The storage of e-mail is abstracted away. Gmail doesn’t talk about storing e-mail. Gmail talks about organising e-mail, using labels.

It also integrates certain little features that most e-mail clients ignore entirely, or support as an afterthought. One such example is threading. Gmail groups all messages into “conversations.” Always. Labels apply to conversations, not individual messages, so that you can’t forget to label them.

Unfortunately, Gmail lacks a few obvious features and at least one not-so-obvious,-but-would-be-wicked-useful-to-me feature. For example, Gmail’s filters can only match a very limited set of headers. Fortunately, list and delivered-to are included in that set. Unfortunately, most everything else isn’t.

Catch All

The killer feature for me would be, sadly, rather niche. I use Gmail’s catch-all feature in order to receive e-mail addressed to any address which end up at my domain. This means that I have absolute control over everyone who wants to send me e-mail.

Example: I sign up for Formspring. I tell them my e-mail address is John.Formspring@…. Then, if I ever receive a message addressed to that address which is not directly from Formspring, I would know that Formspring sold my e-mail address to spammers. Even better: I can block that entire e-mail address, and only the spammers and Formspring lose contact with me. (I should note that this has never happened with Formspring; its just an example.)

NeXTSTEP

Gmail does this. What I want Gmail to do is one step further. I want Gmail to filter based on the incoming address, automatically. I can set up filters, and I do, but I have to set up a filter manually for each incoming address. I want my e-mail system to automatically parse the delivered-to header, tokenise the domain-dependent portion, drop the “John”, and use the rest as a label.

I could achieve this with procmail(1), but I would need to route my e-mail through a system running procmail. That would mean no Gmail. I don’t want to lose all the other benefits of Gmail.