Moving to PulseAudio is pretty painless. Just need to install the package and edit /etc/pulse/client.conf to have:

autospawn = yes

One issue I did have was I kept hearing my microphone input in my headphones using a USB headset.
Fixing this was quite simple - in alsamixer, use F6 …

No more Google SMTP for your aliases

Since August last year, Google have grandfathered a feature in GMail that allows you to create aliases in your account and send emails as those aliases from their SMTP servers:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/external-addresses-no-longer-use-gmail.html

For any new aliases …