going google

So I dissed Google Apps. Now I am going to have to eat my words.Over the past two weeks I have moved a lot further than I expected onto Google:1. The first step was a switch to Gmail. The switch was prompted when my Mac Mail account was put on hold for 24 hours because I had reached some message limit or other.  Accepted, it does take a lot of mail to get put on hold. However, I had received and forwarded a shed load of stuff.  Mail went down when I needed it most.  So I tried Gmail as a temporary solution for that 24 hour period. However, after that first 24 hours  I decided to experiment and have both my work and Mac Mail routed through Gmail. One thing that enabled me to do this is Gmails “reply to” feature, which allows me to hide the fact I am replying from my Gmail account. So I still get the benefit of a very nice @mac.com email address and nobody I know will have had any idea I am using Gmail rather than Mac Mail.  One thing I have noticed though is that my spam seems to have been cut right down . One thing that I have been wondering is whether accessing  Gmail  using the mobile google app in my Blackberry is less data hungry than actually receiving mail using the Blackberry “push” . 2. I have been working away from home for a while and I was sick of carting around  my laptop looking for wifi access. Using google documents I have been able to camp at a cybercafe or hotel pc and access my work. God knows why .Mac is not as functional. I have no objection to paying Apple £80 a year for my .Mac account but it’s not up to much at the moment. I hope Leopard is going to herald a real change with .Mac.  Problems? The major one is that Google documents do not work with Safari, nor do they work with any other browser, including Firefox and Seamonkey on my G5. So with my Macintels I have been forced to migrate to Firefox, which I think is ugly. However, I have the google toolbar now and I have migrated all my bookmarks to Google and I am using the Reader and Notebook, both of which are fantastic apps. The Gmail interface is not as pretty as Mail, in fact I kind of find it hard to follow email conversations, but I am getting used to it.