Finally, a way to hide your Gmail addiction - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Back in May, I lamented a crucial problem that was delaying a dream of mine — a truly universal e-mail inbox. Google’s Gmail, by far the most flexible Web-based e-mail system, gives users several tools to combine all of their many e-mail addresses into one inbox. You can run your work e-mail, your personal e-mail, your college alumni e-mail and every other online identity from the same space.

It’s pretty handy — but there was a problem. If someone wrote to your office e-mail address and you responded from Gmail, the system would add a tag to your message alerting people that you weren’t really writing from your company’s Web domain. To some recipients, your message would carry a suspicious clause: “From yourgmail@gmail.com on behalf of youroffice@domain.com.” This made you look like a poseur, and could cause all kinds of trouble...