Its no secret that I’ve long been a fan of Gmail. In fact, I moved my main email domain to Google’s hosted service about  two years ago. I’ve loved the flexibility, space, search, and tagging that are tightly incorporated into the service.

The only problem was a few niggling odds & ends. Not big issues mind you, but a few things that just make it hard to switch 100% to a web-only email environment. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been about 87% of the way there already. When out & about I use the web interface daily for most email tasks. When I need to find something – use the web interface for searching. I’ve used both POP and IMAP to view mail on my Windows Mobile phone since I signed up – and much more.

The few items have been enough for me to keep an email client installed, and here they are:

• Creating HTML emails
• Custom HTML Signatures
• Contact Synchronization with my phone (the real biggie)

A number of these I’ve gotten around. Early on I found that I can cut & paste an email signature from a web page to a Gmail email when composing. Simple, but not convenient. The number of specialized HTML emails that I send are small and the Gmail editor is up to 99% of the tasks. The contact thing is the hardest to get past though.

I have a Windows Mobile phone, and contacts in Outlook sync right to the phone easier than anything else that exists out there. Period. I’ve had Nokia, Samsungs, Motorolas, and BlackBerrys – and all had sync tools that worked, but none as easy as Outlook to Windows Mobile.

At any rate, the real issue with contacts is getting them synchronized between Outlook and Gmail. It’s extremely tough. With the upcoming release of the T-Mobile G1 “Google phone”, it looks like all that might actually be ending. With built-in Gmail support it also has the ability to sync your phonebook with Gmail contacts. Sweet!

So I’ve been debating whether to throw down on this device or not. It may be the one, the final piece that let’s me go web-only for email management.

Oh, the signature piece – yeah I found this great Firefox plug-in called Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures which allows you to have up to four HTML signatures for each Gmail account. Highly recommended!

So is this the final piece to my text communication puzzle? It very well may be.

And 3G to boot! 😀