@widianothman

What I do is I have a quasi-personal gmail account at my flyte.biz account. I use Gmail to access all my email for a number of reasons, so that any email to my gmail or flyte.biz account ends up in one place.

You should get comfortable with multiple gmail accounts b/c certain platforms (Twitter immediately comes to mind) you can only have one account associated w/an email. Thus, multiple free gmail accounts are the way to go.

Here’s how you can send “branded” emails from your gmail account: http://www.flyteblog.com/flyte/2009/06/how-to-send-branded-domain-emails-from-gmail.html

Hope this helps!

My set-up:
1. Personal email 
2. Rob@Boonze.com forwards to Rob.Boonze@gmail.com
3. Rob.Boonze@gmail.com. From there I can send from Rob@Boonze.com, but use Rob.Boonze@gmail.com for actual registrations. 

Hope that helps. 
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Edited for typo. I need to proofread, hate losing points!

@widianothman, I agree with @rich-brooks.  I get this question a lot from clients. Gmail is a great platform for managing multiple identities.  Most of us have at least 3 different hats we wear- our business, our personal and most of us also belong so some kind of membership, association or board where we are doing a lot of work.  I have 7 different domain emails that all get forwarded to my gmail account but my gmail account is setup to reply back through whichever email address I get the original email from so people don’t know that I’m always replying back through my gmail.  You can also setup a different signature for each email account which I love. 

The bigger question is this.. which email platform suits your other needs – calendar, tasks, email files, etc.?  I have all my emails forward into gmail because I use google calendar, docs. voice, etc. and can organize all emails from all accounts in one place.  You can set your gmail so that all emails from particular email accounts automatically get labeled as certain files.  That’s why I like having everything forward into one place. I consider it like a train depot… Lots of trains coming into one central clearinghouse.

I’m with @rich-brooks on this one.

Though I took it one step further — You can Get started with Google Apps for free with up to 10 custom user accounts. To learn more go to: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html

This way you can set up your email as me@mydomain.com

I still forward all my other email to this one account so I can manage all my email in one interface, and I too add additional emails to the “send mail as” setting with the default my business email.

Fortunately by the time I set up my Google business apps account I was able to set up my google+ account without the issues that @cmichaelcroston experienced.

Hi again guys … i am going to ask another question … here we go .. please dont kill me :$ …

I am going to use my work email: xxx@companyDomain.com to open a google account. and with this google account i can run: Picasa, YouTube, Blogger, Calendar, News, Alerts, etc.

Correct? so there is no need to actually use a Gmail email for a Google Account because i can use my work email for a Google Account.

I know i have confused all of you, but this is because i asked the question without being clear the first time around … so i hope this is now more clear…

so is it ok to use a work email for a google account?

and if not, what you guys are basically saying is: You can transfer all other emails into your gmail email, and u can reply to them with different signatures and people will think u r actually using many emails when in fact u r replying through only one email. right?

it sounds like a great thing to do …

ayy i feel so confused … so sorry! apologies to all!

Thanks a lot!

ayyy Max! @demorden i have the same wonder! … wish i can have all the answers!

anyhow thanks a lot for ur reply appreciated!