Here’s an inter­est­ing Gmail prob­lem I found the other day. One that is a little wor­ry­ing on two counts. The first: It seems gmail are slow to roll out new fea­tures to non-US accounts, And the second: It appears that the code archi­tec­ture behind gmail is quite poor. Or at least the inter­na­tion­al­iz­a­tion of it is badly designed and doesn’t use com­mon code.

I recently spot­ted this post by Aaron Swartz on the Google Web­log:

Gmail: New From Address

Without appar­ent fan­fare, Google now lets you change your From address to any email address you can verify. Click on Set­tings, then Accounts. Once you’ve veri­fied the email you can go back there to make the new address the default. (Thanks, Noah!)

Great! This is a fea­ture I have been wait­ing for for quite a while. Mul­tiple eas­ily select­able from addresses. When I sign up to mail­ing lists and for­ums or when I register on a web site, I always give a new email address based on the name of the list, forum, or site. That way I can identify where mail comes from, can fil­ter it more eas­ily (it all get for­war­ded to the same address), and can trace spam if any­one sells my email address. But post­ing to mail­ing lists usu­ally requires the from address to be the same as the one you signed up with. Using Gmail with its single from address makes this a prob­lem. Thus I was really pleased to see this new fea­ture announced.
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