E-mail to the 21st century!!

One of the gripes I've had with being an iPhone / OSX user is being able to keep my email synchronized. First, a breakdown of what I tried:

1. .Mac - Since paying for email is soo 1995 and the +20 to pretentious achieved from weilding a 'mac.com' address was less than desired, using Apple's .Mac service was out of the question.
2. MediaTemple - The next place I tried was the webserver that this site is on - MediaTemple. While I had no problems getting IMAP to work, MT's reliability and speed rank way to low for me to use as my main email.
3. Lastly was the official iPhone email provider - Yahoo. Yahoo boasts the coolest feature of them all, Push IMAP actually pings your iPhone when you have new mail so your mail is always current and you can save battery life. Of course, Yahoo is not without it's flaws; it has crappy email addresses (can't even use Push IMAP with a Yahoo Business account?) and the oh-so-brilliant lack of being able to check your email with ANY desktop client.

Fast forward to last week.. With my domain back in my posession from squatters, I decided to give Google a whirl. The solution that Google offers gives me the following features:

• Send mail from a custom domain.
• IMAP synchronization
• Arguably a great web client, though I'm not used to it
• Excellent spam protection
• Works well with apple Mail / other desktop mail clients
• Very fast and reliable

and what you'll need:

• A domain name
• Access to advanced DNS setup (MX records)

To get this setup you'll only need to do two simple things:

Go to Google Apps website. Setup a Google Apps account. There you will be walked through a few steps to get email setup on your custom domain name.

Setup the iPhone using Google's simple instructions.

My impression of GMail so far has been quite good. The speed and reliability has been better than any other email account I have tried on the iPhone. Apple Mail works flawlessly albeit slightly slower than POP. The only things that don't feel quite right is GMails use of labels instead of the traditional folders and the slightly awkward 'All Mail' label. Other than that, this seems like the best way to get your mail on an iPhone and stay synchronized with a desktop client.