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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