I have a lot of email addresses. I have a couple of my own for the domain names I own, plus webmaster addresses, support addresses, and then the addresses I give out when shopping online or signing up for forums or newsletters. I'd been using Mozilla Thunderbird to manage all of it, but there were a number of limitations to this setup. First and foremost being the issue of synchronization. I could generally keep my incoming mail synchronized by setting my mail server not to delete messages right away so that both my desktop and laptop would be able to grab all my new mail, but sending mail was a bigger issue. Generally the mail I sent would only be on one or the other. And the idea of BCCing myself on all mail just doesn't appeal.

Having set up a GMail account a while ago, I found the interface nice, clean, and easy to deal with. However, I don't want to use an email address that ends in "gmail.com", so I started looking into forwarding my other addresses to my GMail account, and as I was digging found Google Apps which lets you manage email from your own domain through Google, as well as brand it a little, share calendars and documents, and it's all free for the basic setup. $50 per user per year isn't bad at all either for 25 GB of space and other features they offer with their premium edition.

One of the nice things about it is that Google supports IMAP for their email, which my hosting provider doesn't. This lets me keep everything in sync in one place since all my sent email gets placed on the server. Thunderbird has IMAP support, as well as offline support so that I can make sure all the email gets downloaded physically to my laptop before going on the road just in case I need to look up something in my email when I don't have access to the internet.

There's also a couple of Thunderbird plug-ins that let me sync my calendar and contacts through Google as well:
- Lightning is the calendar plug-in for Thunderbird
- Provider for Google Calendar allows you to edit Google calendars instead of just view them. Lightning can natively view calendars because Google makes them available in iCal format, but you need the above plug-in if you want to actually edit them through Thunderbird.
- Zindus lets you synchronize your contacts in Thunderbird with your Google contacts.

Now if I can just find a way to synchronize my contacts with my phone, I'll be happy. You can set up Google to send SMS notifications for events on your calendar. Which is nice as a stop gap, but being able to sync the calendar on my phone with my Google calendar(s) would be better.