Google have openned up gmail to anybody with a mobile phone. I guess they still don't want just anyone (like a robot) signing on...
Anyway, I've created two gmail accounts: sinewalker@gmail.com and lockhart.mic@gmail.com
sinewalker will be my main account, consuming storage on Google's servers and consolidating my other emails at Yahoo!, eXeTeL and the other gmail account.
lockhart.mic will be my “serious” account, for putting on job applications and such. I've set it to forward all email to sinewalker and delete it's own copy (so in effect, it's just an alias and consumes no additional storage at Google).
Because Google has this neat identity changing feature, I can send an email from sinewalker@gmail.com with a From: and Reply-To: address of lockhart.mic@gmail.com:
Date: Tue, 30 May 2006 09:23:45 +1000From: "Michael Lockhart" <lockhart.mic@gmail.com>Reply-To: lockhart.mic@gmail.comSender: sinewalker@gmail.comTo: "Lockhart, Michael J" <michael.lockhart@im.not.telling.com>Subject: Re: Testing, 1.2.3...
Unfortunately, because of the Sender: field, MS-Outlook renders this as “From: sinewalker@gmail.com on behalf of Michael Lockhart[lockhart.mic@gmail.com]”, so it's not perfectly transparent (then again, I'm not trying to impersonate another person anyway, so it's no big deal). In replying to the above test reply, The Reply-To: field worked on this test email too, generating lockhart.mic@gmail.com in the reply's To: field (did you follow that? what a convoluted sentance!).
So, now I have a google-mail account and a permanent (so long as I log into it every nine months, or six months to be safe) serious sounding email address, not tied to my ISP. Guess it's time to update all the web-sites with this address…