Like everybody else, I have a love and hate relationship with email, and I have felt more hate than love for SMTP recently. Too many emails to keep track off, and too much spam not being filtered by my email client are contributing to spoil our already strained relationship. Nevertheless, a couple of things can be done to salvage it, especially when using Gmail. Here they are.

First, if you’re using Gmail as primary email client and iPhone as primary mobile device, you might want to consider abandoning the iPhone’s email client (Mail), and using Gmail directly through Safari instead. It’s not as fast and does not work offline, but I do not know anyone masochistic enough to consider doing any serious emailing work by using an offline iPhone. Gmail on iPhone is now fast enough to be used on a regular basis, and its searching capabilities are unmatched — Mail does not do search at all… Also, by accessing Gmail directly, you solve the issue of synchronization across email clients, which I could never make to work, even with IMAP.

Second, if you’re sick and tired of receiving too much Russian spam, you might want to consider creating a filter that will catch all emails containing Cyrillic characters (assuming you’re not reading and writing Russian of course).This filter seems to be doing the trick.

Third and last, if you’re a Salesforce.com user and have been waiting for a decent integration with Gmail, don’t wait any longer and go the quick and dirty way instead. While Salesforce.com can help you compose and send emails decently well, it’s not designed to help you receive them. It’s a shame really, but it’s the way it is. Until the good folks out there fix it, you might want to consider adding a simple custom link to your Contact page layout, allowing you to display all emails exchanged with a given contact through a single mouse click. It’s not as sexy as a full blown integration, but this mashup should help you achieve most of what you could do with a full-blown integration. Here is the (trivial) piece of code for it:

Now, back to work!