Gmail just keeps getting better. I’ve been using it for about half a year now, and I’ve been extremely satisfied with it. But a few days ago, they added another very useful feature: It is now possible to associate your Gmail account with one or more other email addresses (verification required) and specify those in the “From” field when sending emails. You can specify the default address in your settings, but you can also conveniently change this using a drop-down on a per message basis.
I use Gmail for all my personal email, but my canonical email address that I give out is a digitalhobbit.com address that simply forwards to my Gmail account. I also have an older forwarding address that I still monitor, as well as a couple of throwaway forwarding addresses that I use to sign up at various websites but that I could get rid of fairly painlessly when the amount of spam becomes too high. Now I can finally have the proper address (ususually my canonical digitalhobbit.com email address) in my “From” field instead of having to put it into the “Reply-To” field. This is particularly important for some mailing lists that require the proper “From” address, which has been bugging me recently.