Tag: google accounts

Gmail's support for multiple accounts in a single interface

I have multiple gmail and google apps accounts and hate the idea that I have to go through each of them to check them out.

There was always the possibility that I can forward them all to one big merge account, but then I would have to reply to a mail sent to mihail1@gmail.com with a mail account of mihail.merge@gmail.com and the user that sent a mail to mihail1@gmail.com would receive a response from mihail.merge@gmail.com which is not consistent (emails are made up).

Google has a fast account switch in the upper right corner, but that is not consistent, and google apps that have not been upgraded cannot use this feature.

Today I found out that gmail has substantially upgraded their support for other accounts.

This feature is found here gmail -> mail settings -> accounts -> send mail as:

First, you can "own" other email accounts with your google account, which means that you confirm that you own that other email address. For example I can own mihail1@gmail.com from my mihail.merge@gmail.com. Then when I log in to mihail.merge@gmail.com I can send mail pretending to be from mihail1@gmail.com which is very cool. Long time ago gmail used to say that the mail may come from mihail1@gmail.com, but really it was from mihail.merge@gmail.com which made this feature useless. This is no longer the case. But for that to work gmail will use the smtp server of mihail1@gmail.com (one has to supply user/pass for gmail to be able to login). Now gmail leaves no trace (I checked the headers) of the account the mail was really sent from - I always add reply-to address when I own an email, haven't tested it without supplying.

Second, gmail automatically sets the from field when sending a message. This feature is really cool. If I login to gmail with mihail.merge@gmail.com and receive a message sent to mihail1@gmail.com and click reply, gmail will automatically set the from: field to mihail1@gmail.com even though I'm logged as mihail.merge@gmail.com. This makes this feature an awesome one. Thus the guy that is sending mail to mihail1@gmail.com would have no idea I'm logged to gmail as mihail.merge.

The last thing, how to get the mail from mihail1 to mihail.merge? I use the forward feature. It works fine. Gmail allows me to add a mail and check for incoming mail via pop or imap, but does that with a timer, which would mean mail would arrive more slowly. This might have changed since I last used it.

Adding filters to sort mail makes this feature complete.

Conclusion: it's now easy to use one gmail account that can receive and now send mail from multiple accounts. Great work, Google.

Gmail Accounts, Google Apps Accounts and Google Accounts

When I chose Google Apps for my domain (stoynov.com) I created myself a Google Apps account at mihail@stoynov.com. I already had a Gmail account at mihail.stoynov@gmail.com that later became a "Google Account". Google accounts have access to all google services like Reader, Docs, Groups, so on. I wanted to migrate my Gmail account to my Google Apps account and still be able to use all google services. Unfotunately Google Apps accounts have access only to a special "Google Apps" version of Docs, Calendar and Gmail, but no access to Reader and very weird access to Groups.

At some point Google decided that "Google Accounts" could be made with emails other that Gmail. And Google proposed that I create a "Google Account" for my Google Apps account, so I did. So at some point I have the following:
mihail.stoynov@gmail.com - my Gmail account.
mihail@stoynov.com - my Google Apps account for stoynov.com domain
mihail@stoynov.com - my "Google Account".

At some point Google suggested that I create a Gmail account for mihail@stoynov.com and suggested the address mihail.stoynov.com@gmail.com so that my "Google Account" would be "complete".

Now what does "complete" mean? Well, here comes the "issue" with google groups. I had been subscribed to many google groups and to some I had admin privileges and to some I didn't. When I created mihail@stoynov.com I wanted to move my subscriptions from mihail.stoynov@gmail.com to the new account. Well, this happened to be harder that I thought. First, non "Google Accounts" don't have access to the web interface of Google Groups (groups.google.com) and thus cannot be admins to such groups. So then I subscribe to these groups with my mihail@stoynov.com "Google Account". And at some point there was a Google Group with the following subscriptions:
mihail@stoynov.com (referring to my Google Apps account)
mihail@stoynov.com (referring to my "Google Account")

There's one other stupid thing - I couldn't have a picture to my "Google Account", because I didn't have a Google Profile. Google Profile looked like a personal page with a lot of personal info. So I chose not to have a picture. But I digress.

This was all working ok, even though it was really stupid, but at some point Google Apps' version of Google Docs didn't work ok with my iPhone and said that I have logged with the wrong account. And then I checked the admin panel of my Google Apps and it said something like "Google is changing, you can migrate your Google Apps to a newer version that would allow you to have access to all Google services. And I said, well finally. Google Apps should have been like this from the start.

Now follows part 2 that explains the migration.