Gmail vs Mail for multiple accounts?

[yongren]

Hi, so I have four or five email accounts that I have been managing with Gmail for a long time. I have everything forwarded to my main Gmail account automatically, and then I can send mail from whichever account I prefer to as well.
I also have a pretty refined filter system to label all my mail according to category.

Having finally switched to Lion and with iCloud looming, I'm thinking there will be advantages to using OS X's default Mail app, such as more seamless & reliable integration with my iPhone, etc...



-Has anyone else made this transition & do you have any thoughts on the matter?

-Is there a way to import filters & labels from Gmail, or if nothing else, does Mail have a labeling functionality included? If so, how does it compare to Gmail?

-Is it best to de-link all my other emails from Gmail, and add them into Mail one by one? Or would it be good enough just to add my Gmail account to Mail?


Sorry if this has been discussed overmuch in the past. I did do a cursory forum search, but didn't see anything immediately relevant to my question...

Thanks for your time.

 

[r0k]

Hi, so I have four or five email accounts that I have been managing with Gmail for a long time. I have everything forwarded to my main Gmail account automatically, and then I can send mail from whichever account I prefer to as well.
I also have a pretty refined filter system to label all my mail according to category.

Having finally switched to Lion and with iCloud looming, I'm thinking there will be advantages to using OS X's default Mail app, such as more seamless & reliable integration with my iPhone, etc...



-Has anyone else made this transition & do you have any thoughts on the matter?

-Is there a way to import filters & labels from Gmail, or if nothing else, does Mail have a labeling functionality included? If so, how does it compare to Gmail?

-Is it best to de-link all my other emails from Gmail, and add them into Mail one by one? Or would it be good enough just to add my Gmail account to Mail?


Sorry if this has been discussed overmuch in the past. I did do a cursory forum search, but didn't see anything immediately relevant to my question...

Thanks for your time.

On OS X, I find I can "reply as" whoever the email was addressed to when using my gmail account. But when using my .me account, I'm forced to reply as my me.com from address. No thanks. I don't want to mix my business and personal email contact information for those I send mail to. It's even worse on iOS devices and I find myself using the gmail app so I can "reply as" my domain rather than being forced to reply as the login being used to retrieve mail.

In summary, if you add your gmail account to mail, you should be able to set whatever from address you like. If you forward your gmail to .me, you will find you can only reply as your .me account regardless of who the email you are replying to was addressed to.

In fact, I'd go a step further and say don't do anything to change your gmail setup. Nothing. Wait until you have mail.app doing exactly what you want under all circumstances. If mail.app won't do something you need when you need it, at least you can log in to google through the web and get what you need to do done.

 

[whistlerdan]

For what it's worth it IS possible to have receive from G-mail and send out as any e-mail address you specify when using iOS.

My scenario is I have 5 different e-mail addresses forwarding to one gmail account. In iOS I set up the gmail account to I receive all my mail. I can then reply using any address right from my mail app.

On Lion though I have yet to discover how to do the same thing.... unlike the poster above, I do not seem to be able to reply as anyone but my gmail address in the Mail app for lion.