Webmails are quite useful to access your mailbox anywhere. But when you’re working at home you generally want to use a mail application — which is more comfortable and more integrated to your system. The problem with using both systems is that you can’t access e-mails you’ve sent so far. I never found any solution… until Gmail.

Gmail offers a POP service to retrieve e-mails but also offer an SMTP service to send e-mails. With SMTP, you can sent e-mails directly through Gmail instead of using your ISP mail service.

By configuring your mail application with Gmail POP and SMTP, all your mail traffic — in and out — will go through Gmail. When you send a mail, Gmail will archive it like if it were written right from the web. And when you retrieve a mail, it will be automatically stored into the Gmail archive. Now you can have all your e-mails available online — ready for search — as well as locally on your computer — best of both worlds.

There are others positive aspects in using Gmail as your mail provider: you get efficient spam filtering for free and secured POP/SMTP connections. Actually very few ISP propose that feature and I’ve always wanted to secure my mail transactions. Now that’s done.

The only feature I miss is being able to crypt and sign my e-mails. Gmail does not offer any way to do this but I guess it will be come by later.

UPDATE (04-29-2007): if you are using your own mail server (from your hosting company) with an e-mail adress which is not one from Gmail you can still use this tips. Configure you e-mail server to forward your mails to your Gmail account and you’re done.