You are right that a single Gmail account can be used to get and send mail from several different accounts. But it doesn’t do this the same way Mail does. Gmail cannot simply DISPLAY mail from several accounts; it must GET the mail in order to display it. Say I have two Google accounts, one for work and one for personal mail. To view the personal mail in the work account, I have to ask the work account to GET the personal account’s messages or have the personal account automatically forward messages to my work account. Either way, an actual message ends up in the work account. This means (a) anybody with access to my work account can see all those messages, and (b) the messages use up the storage space for my Google work account. I should perhaps add (c) that, with all my eggs now in one basket, if anybody hacks that basket — and it’s happened to me — well, I risk losing more messages than I would otherwise.

What Mail does is simply provide a single window that displays messages from several accounts. And Mail is flexible about how it does this. If I recall correctly (I didn’t check this in Mail) I can filter the display in Mail so it shows messages from my work account AND my personal account, or one or the other.

I do not want to dump everything into one account because I get too much mail and I like to keep the types of mail separate in my head. When I want to see urgent work mail, I don’t want to see personal bill notices in the same window, most of the time. But sometimes I DO want a quick overview of what I’ve got. Mail is more flexible here than Gmail. If Mailplane could do this, I’d use it. But it can’t. So I live with Gmail’s limitations and have three tabs open in my web browser all day long.

That has changed and now, as you noted, it is possible once again to open different accounts in different tabs at the same time. I am glad they fixed that.

What I cannot do in Gmail, however, is view indifference longing to different accounts in the same window. Well, I could do it but only by forwarding mail from accounts B, C, and D to account A, then doing all my email reading in account A. I prefer not to do that. So, in Gmail, to stay on top of messages in several accounts, I have to keep switching tabs to see if there is anything new.

Apple Mail will display all of my inboxes in a single list. Much more efficient.

I thinked too about the switch from Gmail to Mail.app on Lion but I’m still with the first because it’s simply the best for me at the moment

Hope this helps…

Bye,
Nicola.

But most recently, after installing OS X v10.7.2 and iOS 5, I’ve been trying Mail again. I re-read Joe Kissell’s excellent article on email “bliss” over at Tidbits.com and followed, in detail, his elaborate instructions for configuring Gmail and Mail to work together. Really a lot of trouble to go to, as Kissell admits. But it seems to work. Has mitigated or perhaps eliminated the problem of duplicate messages in Mail, which used to annoy the heck out of me. I do like the Mail UI in OS X.7 and I also like Mail on my iPad 2 3G.

So once again I’m using Mail. Don’t know for how long.

I am generally enthusiastic about Mail, but I miss a couple things about Gmail. I like Gmail’s labels and prefer labels to folders, but that’s a fairly minor technical quibble. Big advantage of labels is that you can assign two labels to the same message without duplicating it, where you can’t put the same message into two folders without duplicating it. But I don’t want to do either of these things very often. I also rather like Gmail’s distinction between “important” mail and everything else. The biggest thing I miss is having that “undo send” feature. That has saved me more than once in Gmail. I’m trying to be careful about hitting the Send button in Mail.

- Will