It’s a GMail-specific mail client for OS X that captures the spirit of GMail pretty well, and keeps everything perfectly in sync. You can archive or delete messages, tag them, even manage multiple accounts from a Tweetie-style sidebar. (The application actually takes a lot of design cues from Tweetie/Twitter.)

It also works with Google Apps accounts, so you can use it for your domain email.

Sparrow is a very nice email client, and is available in the Mac App Store for a reasonable price. I’ve been using it out since the last week of the beta, and it has convinced me to stop using the GMail website for my day-to-day email reading in favor of Sparrow. It complements the iPhone email client nicely in my daily workflow.

Unfortunately, Apple decided it would be a good idea to change the “Delete” button to an “Archive” button for GMail accounts under iOS 4. I don’t really need to keep messages about my server’s recent five minutes of downtime for any length of time, so I thought this was kind of stupid.

I was able to find a fix, however. Open your settings and navigate to the “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” page. Tap on your GMail account. Then turn off the slider for “Archive Messages.”

I don’t mind the idea of an Archive option in the Mail app, but not to the exclusion of a Delete function. Some things just don’t need to be kept.

The authentication protocol’s biggest shortcoming is not the lack of websites support it, since more sites would implement OpenID logins if there were enough user demand; it’s not a shortage of OpenID providers either, since many large sites offer OpenID URLS. No, the problem is the users. The average web user just can’t seem to wrap their head around the concept.

I was recently struck by an idea that might simplify the experience for non-techies. What if OpenIDs could be in the form of an email address? Everyone is familiar with email addresses, and many sites have already accustomed their users to having their email address as a login name. If you really think about it, email addresses are already what OpenID has set out to be: a persona that you connect various websites to.

Imagine if GMail as your OpenID provider. To log in to an OpenId relying website you would input your email address, be sent over to GMail to verify, and then redirected back. I think it would be a little more user-friendly, providing that OpenID-providing email services made it clear that they offered the service.

Notify sits in your menu bar, up by the clock, and monitors multiple email accounts. It will check GMail, Google Apps, MobileMe, Rackspace, and generic IMAP boxes. When new messages come in, the number on the badge updates, and it can optionally make sounds or show Growl notifications.

If the ability to monitor multiple accounts isn’t enough for you, this feature will win you over: You can do basic email tasks right from Notify. You can press the spacebar to open a full preview of an email.  You can delete messages, mark them as read, or even send quick messages. It’s cut down on the number of times I’ve had to actually visit my inbox, as I can trash and quick-view messages without loading up the web interface.

It’s $10 for the full version, with a trial, but the basic inbox monitoring features are still available after the trial period is over.

My tip for today is too merge all of your email down into one account. GMail, and Google Apps, make this fairly easy. If you have a domain, I recommend using Google Apps. It’s much cooler to have you@yourdomain.com instead of domainlessguy73@gmail.com.

Once your new GMail-based email account is set-up, head over to the “Accounts” tab on the settings screen. Here you will configure your account to be the one place you go to check your email.

There are two ways to get messages from your other email inboxes into the new one. You have POP/IMAP and you have forwards. Here’s what I did:

• I picked my NTugo.com email address (powered by Google Apps) to be my new main account.
• I used POP to pull all of the messages from my old GMail account to my new inbox. After all of the emails were transferred, I set them all to “read,” and set the GMail account to delete the messages from it’s inbox after NTugo Mail grabs them via POP. So now any message sent to my GMail account go to the NTugo inbox.
• I went to my web host’s control panel and changed my Webmaster-Source.com email account from a normal inbox to a forward. Now any emails that go to matt at webmaster source dot com go to my main email inbox.
• I repeated the previous two steps for my other email accounts.
• Now all my email goes to one place.

I recommend setting-up some filters to label incoming messages with a tag corresponding to the address the message was sent to.

People have been doing this for as long as Google has provided this service, so this is nothing new. I’m just passing on the advice.