Rick’s Rants and Raves

I’ve recently had some difficulty finding an e-mail solution that works for me and my family. Until a week ago I had been using a Gmail account to manage multiple other accounts for myself. Since my primary address is a non-gmail address, I use the “send mail as” feature to use Gmail to send e-mail as a my primary account on nearbennett.com. The problem is that some clients receive my e-mails as “Sent on behalf of”. So people see both the Gmail account and my preferred account and aren’t sure which one is right. Replies come properly addressed, but I’m still annoyed by the “Sent on behalf of”.

I learned about Google Apps from Skippy a couple of months ago, and decided to give it a try.

Its an interesting concept that lets me manage various aspects of my domain through Google. Their instructions are complete and easy to follow for anyone who has heard of DNS. You don’t have to know the difference between a CNAME and an MX record. So I set up my Google account to manage e-mail and a “start” page. I expected they would be just like Gmail and iGoogle, respectively.

Unfortunately, the Google Apps versions of e-mail and iGoogle appear to be older versions. For example:

• The UI for GA e-mail is about 2 years old, compared with the current GMail version
• The GA e-mail client still has a bug that prevents users from editing imported contacts.
• The GA start page doesn’t allow multiple tabs, whereas the current iGoogle does.
• The GA start page doesn’t allow users (or admins) to customize the number of columns, but iGoogle does.

The other problem I currently have with my Google Apps is that it doesn’t have a version of Google Reader. So, to continue using Google reader, I have to maintain the Gmail account.

Oh well. So far, the Google Apps have been fun to experiment with, and functional enough. If Google Calendar had an off-line client, I might be able to convince my wife to use it.