For a good while — all of 2010 and for a while earlier, if I recall — I was getting along pretty well using my web browser (generally Chrome) to access my three main email accounts, all of which are hosted by Google. I was able to open each account in its own tab and leave it there. The first three tabs in my browser were almost always email accounts 1, 2 and 3. My browser was able to store the URLs that gave access to each account and remember each account’s password, so it wasn’t necessary for me to provide my username and password every time I relaunched my browser. I just went to the URL and my email appeared.

Google, in an effort (apparently) to make life easier for users, wrecked this earlier in 2011. Google’s apparently now regards any one of the three URLs that I used to go to as pointing to a sort of integrated Google master account, and I now have to log into each account separately. I can, with a little luck, still have each of the accounts in its own tab, but for some reason that doesn’t always work for me. And switching from one account to the other, if I don’t have them in separate tabs, is a minor pain. Not a big deal, but enough to annoy me. Moreover, this approach meant that only one account at a time could be the default active account for that browser, and that was causing me problems occasionally when I wanted to get to Picasa Web Albums or Google+ or my calendar or Google Docs, web apps that belong to different Google accounts.

Around the same time, a couple of months ago, Apple released Lion (Mac OS X.7) with a new and much-improved version of Mail. I tried it out. I was pleased, no, impressed, at how easy it was to configure Mail to get to my Gmail accounts via IMAP. And I liked being able to get all my mail in a single inbox, which I can’t do in Gmail, at least not without consolidating all my accounts into a single account. Moreover, using Mail meant that I was now storing a backup copy of my email on my computer. I actually trust Google pretty thoroughly, but I suppose it’s not a bad idea for me to have my own copy of my mail somewhere.

So after at first thinking I’d tough it out with Gmail, despite the changes, I decided to try Apple Mail. Another factor in this decision was the fact that I also do email on my iPad, and dealing with multiple Google accounts on an iPad is even more trouble than dealing with multiple Google accounts on my computer. So I was using the Mail app on my iPad, as well. It seemed to work, for a little while.

Then I started noticing that I was getting a lot of duplicate messages. I’d download a new message for the first time — and there might be 3 copies of it in my Mail inbox. Weird.

So I did a little research and discovered that, while it’s possible to get Mail to work as an IMAP client for Gmail, it isn’t easy, and it involves fighting against Google to some extent. Joe Kissell wrote an excellent and fairly enthusiastic piece for Tidbits explaining how he had achieved email bliss with Mail as an IMAP client for Gmail. I read his article carefully, started to implement some of his suggestions — and then came to the conclusion that this was (for me anyway) just crazy. Way, way too much trouble, and I didn’t like the way it involved workarounds to fit Gmail’s square peg into Apple Mail’s round hole.

So I’ve given up that experiment, with just a little regret. Having a single inbox really is a strong advantage for Mail, and it’s possible that I will change my Gmail accounts so that email from two of the accounts is automatically forwarded to the third account, allowing me to access all three from the same, single account. Haven’t decided yet, but I may do it. Would make life easier for me. If I do that, I will also for sure take advantage of Google’s new two-factor authentication, because if I put all my email eggs into the same basket, well, I would like to know that nobody’s going to steal that basket. I’ve already had one Gmail account stolen from me (in summer 2010) so I know that it can happen.

To make things a wee bit easier in the meantime, I’ve bitten the bullet and purchased Mailplane, the OS X app that provides an interface for your Gmail accounts. Mailplane doesn’t give me a single inbox, but it does make accessing my three Gmail accounts a little easier. In many other respects, using Mailplane is very much like accessing Gmail in my web browser, which for the most part is a plus. And using Mailplane allows me to assign a keyboard shortcut (I used F2) to open my email quickly, and there’s some small advantage there too.

I’m still stuck dealing with the problem on my iPad. Don’t want to use the Mail app any more, but alas, there’s no counterpart to Mailplane for the iPad, at least not one that seems to have a really strong reputation. So I’m struggling with using the apps in the browser. The recent release of the Dolphin browser for iPad may help, as Dolphin provides a tabbed UI that’s much easier to navigate than Safari’s multiwindow UI.

Email shouldn’t be so difficult.