I have had the email purists gang up on me for this in the past but I constantly use my Gmail account for backing up my digital life. This has led to the online lynch mobs chanting “an email account is not for backing up important documents!” and they are right to a certain extent. I wouldn’t dream of putting into my Gmail account things like my passport or my birth certificate. I’m not stupid!

With the advent of Apple’s new iPhone and iPod Touch, a whole host of websites have set up mobile version of their regular site. Notable among these various sites is Gmail and all of the related Google web services. (disclaimer: for the rest of this article I will be referring to the iPod touch, but I tested the application to the same extent on the iPhone as well.)

For a while I didn’t have any native mail application on my iPod touch. I bought by iPod in September and didn’t want to pay 20 dollars for the January application upgrade. Being a Gmail user, I was delighted to find that Gmail was such a versatile web app and can be conveniently accessed both from iPhone and iPod Touch.

I am always mystified about why people would want to do this but there is now a way for you to read your Gmail email in a RSS reader.

Previously, it was very difficult, bordering on impossible. Gmail has a RSS feed which is called an “authenticated feed” which basically means you need to enter your username and password in order to access it. A lot of web-based RSS services, including Google Reader ironically enough, don’t support authenticated feeds. In fact, they still don’t. So what FreeMyFeed does is act as the middle man, taking your feed and swapping it for a proxy that the RSS service WILL accept.

With me being in Germany and the rest of the family back in bonny Scotland, that subsequently makes me the black sheep of the family. I only get home once a year and I often get complaints from relatives that they never see me often enough.

But I feel thankful that we live in the age of the internet with email, Skype and webcams. These days, I don’t feel so far away from home as I used to, compared to when I started travelling back in the Dark Ages of 1994. Now Eyejot has made that distance even shorter by giving me the ability to send my parents a video email. All you need is a webcam, microphone and of course yourself.

Despite having fifteen years bureaucratic and administrative experience, I still don’t like office work. Routine paperwork overwhelms me to the point where I want to commit cold-blooded murder, I hate answering letters and emails, I hate having to remember appointments, birthdays, bills, and all the other routine drudgery that goes with life. I just want to write my articles, surf the internet and read my books. In other words, the simple life.

For those who use Apple Mail on Leopard, you will know that it’s a pretty basic e-mail application. It fetches your mail, archives it on your Mac and you might think that it ends there. With a couple of plug-ins however, you could extend the functionality of Apple Mail by miles.

There are a lot of plug-ins out there. A few of them do some pretty cool stuff, and others you probably wouldn’t need. I’m going to focus on four Apple Mail plug-ins which I find to be very useful.