Multi user mail and address book

I have recently got my first Mac and am struggling to find a solution to the following situation.

The Mac gets used by my girlfriend and I on a daily basis. We both logon under the same user account for ease, and so that things like our iPhoto and iTunes library are available to both of us. I think that having separate logons would just be a nuisance in our case.

The two things I am really having problems with in this multi user environment is mail and address book. Is there any way that when you open mail you can get it to prompt you which mailbox you want it to open? The same way you would use an MS Outlook profile. I have it setup so that both our gmail mailboxes are in mail which is a workable solution but it would be great if you could choose which mailbox you wanted to see when opening mail, so that once opened you would only see the selected mailbox.

I would like to set address book to sync with each of our gmail accounts but it appears that you can only sync with one gmail account. Is there a way around this? Ideally I would like it to sync with both our accounts and group the contacts by account.

If possible, I would like to use the built in tools for this but I would consider some third party ones also.

Are there any enhancements in Lion that would help with this situation? Could iCloud help?

I would appreciate any comments or suggestions you have.

Thanks.

 

Thanks for your reply kainjow.

I realize that this is the way things are intended to be setup but it just doesn’t make sense for us. One example of where this setup would cause problems for us is iPhoto. I typically do all the importing, editing and management of our photos but it’s my girlfriend who typically emails a few off to friends and family. The integration between iPhoto and Mail make this seamless and simple task to do for her, but only if you have your iPhoto library in the same user account as the email account you want to send from.

If what I’m looking for is not possible then that’s ok, I have some less ideal workaround ideas. But if there are any others that have dealt with similar situations I would be interested to hear what their solutions were. Or if there are any enhancements to this in Lion. For the address book side of things I was wondering if iCloud may be useful for synchronization of multiple address books?

All input welcome!