Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Why The New .Mac Webmail Is Important…

A little while ago, I got my hands on a MacBook Pro. I’ve been slowly switching over to it as my primary machine. It’s pretty. It’s fast. When using it, I feel calm and happy as if I’m sitting in…

IMHO, the problem with gmail at the end of the day is the fact that it’s realistically *only* available online. I actually *do* like gmail’s interface, but the limitations on using it from anywhere other than gmail.com was unacceptable, as I still want to keep copies of my e-mail offline as well.

As web-mail interfaces go, there is a lot I like about gmail, and ultimately I agree that it’s personal preference as to which is better. I don’t mind Yahoo’s interface *either*, but if all other factors were equal and I had to choose between the two (ie, there was no other option), I”d probably go with gmail.

But until gmail begins to support features like IMAP, it’s not a viable concept for anybody except those people who ONLY want to access their e-mail on the web.

Further, I have never been overly impressed with free e-mail services. My e-mail is too mission-critical for me to trust to any kind of a free service, and especially a service that makes it complicated to keep copies of your e-mail offline (as gmail does).

I’ve gone to some effort to ensure that my mail comes to a domain name that I control, which means I can point it just about anywhere. Therefore, I’m not held hostage by any one service in my ability to *receive* e-mail, and certainly don’t want to be in terms of my *stored* emails.

At least with .Mac, Yahoo, and a slew of other IMAP-based services, I can accept the fact that if the service were to go away tomorrow, my mail wouldn’t go with it (yes, I know you can download all of your mail via POP3 in gmail, but you lose any concept of organization of that mail in the process, which defeats the purpose when dealing with a very large mailbox).

So while I *do* like gmail as a *web-based* client, it lacks too many integration features to be viable as anything more than an alternative account to use for testing and other non-critical stuff.

Multiple accounts via .Mac webmail would be a great feature for me, but as far as I can tell, it doesn’t actually exist, nor is it on the public feature list.

So, how do you know this is a feature in the new .Mac webmail?

The screenshot on the .mac site only shows one inbox, instead of the nested inboxes you get in Mail.app if you have multiple accounts, and there is *nothing* anywhere in Apple’s text that talks about multiple accounts.

Multiple accounts would be a wonderful thing but I wouldn’t count on them being there just because this new interface looks the same as the OS X app!

This technique allows me to forward email from many places to my IMAP email provider (could be .Mac although I’m using another provider) - and have replies work almost seamlessly using the right sent from address in any replies I send. This doesn’t seem to be well documented - but it’s a great feature if you’re interested in consolidating your email.

Scott

The user experience, intellectual and tactile both, has always been Apple’s focus.

To this point, Al, what GMail, and the list of other freebies you mentioned, lacks horribly is integration. This is Apple’s .Mac advantage, of course.

Kyle: you don’t have to pay $100/year. I have a How-To save 20-50% tutorial on my site at apple-project.com. See the sidebar.