(2010-11-03) Multiple Google Accounts

Google's handling of people having multiple accounts is weirdly balkanized.

In the past I've had a GMail account plus other services tied to my fluxent.com IMAP account. And various Google services (e.g. AdWords, Google Analytics) are tied to one account or the other, but I can't merge them. So I have to run 2 browsers.

• semi-related: I have GMail scraping my IMAP account so that I can easily see all my email on my Nexus One when I'm out.

Now I have a 3rd account, as we're using GoogleApps for AEP.

Luckily my Nexus One lets me work with multiple Google accounts simultaneously.

But at my Lap Top, do I need to run multiple browsers just to see my multiple GMail inboxes? Or do I have to use IMAP to scrape one with the other? Or play with Google Chrome incognito windows?

Ah, GMail has a "multiple-sign-in" feature. Though that still requires that I toggle back and forth between 2 GMail accounts, rather than having a single joined inbox...

• and Since GoogleApps customers can already sign in to their accounts at the same time as their personal Google Accounts, we won’t be adding this new feature to Google Apps until the new infrastructure is in place. OK, so that works, but still stuck with 2 separate tabs to watch.

  • I'll probably set up ThunderBird to read the apps-email.

Held up now because we don't have the DNS MX record set up yet (had some domain transfer issues recently).

Nov10 update

• MX record set up, email to that address is now getting through
• turning on IMAP access to the new GMail account and configuring ThunderBird.
  • had to manually get IMAP/SMTP info.