Google may have something - marrying Gmail with one's own email address

Google offers the ability, after some occasionally-complex steps, to keep one's own email address while adding the benefits of some of the features of Gmail to the mix.  Those of you who've talked to me about it know that I'm not a big fan of the Gmail user interface (which I think is awkward, klunky, inefficient, unattractive, inconsistent, and so on), but the core functionality of Gmail is quite good, especially with the addition of Postini spam filtering (Google recently bought Postini). 

The steps to implement this are as arkane as the benefits are real.  One can obtain many of the benefits of a hosted Microsoft Exchange account (which is still the gold standard, and at $8/mailbox doesn't cost a lot of gold) for free and without having to become my-name-was-taken@gmail.com.  Gmail can achieve synchronization with a variety of mobile devices while at the same time allowing users who love a web interface to have mail/contacts/calendar that way, and users who prefer a more responsive local email client like Outlook or other mail clients to use them.

Setting this up is not for the faint of heart.  I've done it a few times now and still don't have all the subtleties completely documented (some of them are real doozies!).  That's where InterConnected Technologies comes in - we know how to do it now!