As of tonight GMail seem to be making their Mail Fetcher feature available to regular GMail accounts - at least it’s now available on the two non-related, US based, accounts I use 
Mail Fetcher allows you to configure GMail to retrieve email from other mail accounts via POP3. When retrieved, external mail may be left on the server, automatically archived, or have a label applied. (The last option is a nice way to highlight non-GMail items in the inbox).
For those of us who love the GMail interface but would prefer to retain existing non-GMail address, this is a massive benefit. Until now I’ve been using server-side forwarding to, but this is a cumbersome solution beyond the capabilities of many people.
As far as I’m concerned there’s only one remaining flaw in GMail: When using a non-GMail address for replies, GMail account details are still included. For example: If I wish to use ‘mail@andrewgrant.org’ for a reply-to address I must authenticate that I can receive email at that address. However, when composing email from that address my GMail account details are still contained in the ‘from’ field. Not only do programs such as Outlook display this in a strange manner (‘From xxxx@gmail.com on behalf of Andrew Grant (mail@andrewgrant.org)), but my GMail address and username is revealed to people from whom I may wish it to remain private.
This, in my opinion, is really sucky. While I suspect it may be the correct behavior with respect to some RFC, it’s certainly not the common-sense one. If I can prove I can receive email at a given address, then I should certainly be able to appear as a first-class citizen sending email from it.
Am I the only person who wants to use multiple addresses from one account?
2006/12/25, 13:01
I guess it’s still not general availability, I don’t have it yet. Do you know if you can fetch from another gmail account? (stupid as it may sound, there is a purpose behind the question…)
As for the ugly “on behalf” issue, have you thought of setting up Google Apps for your domain? Essentially using native gmail with andrewgrant.org – pretty cool.
2006/12/25, 16:47
That’s strange, it seems to have appeared for other people I know as well as myself.
It does look like you can use it to retrieve mail from GMail accounts. I didn’t complete all the steps, but the portion that tests for valid email addresses didn’t reject it (unlike invalid addresses, or your own GMail address).
As for Google Apps for Domain; I signed up for this a while ago to check it out, but didn’t switch. There were two issues;
Firstly only GMail, Docs and Chat are available to Google Apps for Domains accounts. Other services, such as Google Reader or Analytics, require a regular Google sign-in account. That means I’d effectively need to sign into Google twice, and would lose cross-app features.
Secondly; Even when using Google Apps for a domain, sending email from addresses other than the one tied to your account results in the ugly ‘on behalf of’ issue. For example I could be andrew@andrewgrant.org, but if I also needed to send email from blah@andrewgrant.org than that email would still include the ugly ‘on behalf of’ statement
2006/12/26, 02:09
Neat, I have it now too :p