Google Multiple Sign-in Now Available | Hacker News Reader

Google Multiple Sign-in Now Available

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80 pointsjancona20 comments

This is good, but I'm still frustrated by the fact that Google Apps accounts are not full Google Accounts. I wish they'd merge all Google Apps accounts into the regular Google Accounts system. Or is there a reason that this doesn't make sense?

Google is already testing this: http://smarterware.org/6394/google-apps-vs-google-accounts-r...

Oohh this is perfect. I know they did this inside Google for all the @google.com employee accounts back around January. Good to see them pushing it out to the rest of us.

It depends on the use, but I can imagine an organization not wanting a person to be able to access their business e-mail account using simply the username/password of their personal account. So it will really depend on how 'portable' the linking is: if it's being done by cookies on a particular machine, that's less worrisome than if, once linked, the second account is accessible anywhere the first one is.

Very useful, now next I'd like to merge Gmail accounts if that isn't too much to ask for.

What do you mean by merging two accounts? One common inbox for both? There's an existing convoluted way to do that: forward all emails from account B to account A, add account B as a possible "From" address on account A and you're good to go.

I do that, but that's annoying.

I also want to merge accounts, which in my minds means that there really is just one account with several names--emails to all of them go to that one gmail (and it lets me choose which to send from), I can sign into all google services with any of those accounts, etc.

It would be pretty complicated though. I've only used gmail on my secondary accounts, but some people have probably used docs, voice, etc on multiple accounts, in which case all of those need some kind of merging strategy.

Heh, this reminds me of Subversion: branching is easy, the really tricky problem is merging.

You can do that already: I've long fetched mail from two other accounts and any messages I send I can pick which of several e-mail addresses it comes from. "Settings" -> "Accounts and Import" -> "Send mail as:" and "Check mail using POP3:"

This is what I do, but it breaks down when legitimate email ends up in the spam folder in account B. You have to periodically log in to both accounts to make sure you don't lose important emails.

Good point, I hadn't thought of that.

I do that with only one secondary email that generally wouldn't get any emails from real people, so in most cases, I'm covered. But you're right: that technic should come with a warning: you might lose your emails.

I suppose another way to go around might be to retrieve account B through POP or IMAP.

There's a way to fix the spam issue. In the source Gmail account, instead of activating forwarding the normal way, create a filter that will match everything (To: account@gmail.com), and make it forward and not mark as spam.

Using a desktop email client makes this pretty simple- thunderbird, outlook, ect. You can have all emails download into a single folder and reply with whatever email address it was sent to, or you could sent it up so that only one email is used for replies. You can also encrypt the folder that the emails are then stored in- locally.

I personally like this option as I can download and delete all emails off google's servers. My passwords are pretty good, but not great, and if a hacker was able to download ever message I ever sent. :(

I've been using the chrome incognito pages for just this purpose glad to see the feature

Finally. Been waiting for this for a while. It is still not as good as Mailplane so I will stick with it for now. People that are managing multiple Gmail accounts including google app emails should check it out.

Thank goodness! We just signed up for Google Business mail and I have been trying to juggle around two separate Gmail addresses for weeks now. This saves so much hassle.

Didn't know about the incognito trick until today though... I suppose that would have helped quite bit as well.

Although this is useful, it still doesn't solve having multiple address books across multiple accounts. Until it is you can use Soocial.com to sync the contacts between them. (Disclaimer: Soocial's my startup.)

Does anyone know if there are limits to the number of Google Apps accounts you can have? I'd like to link several free accounts I have together--is there any risk in doing this?

I wish this worked with the Checkout sandbox as well - when I'm in my dev environment, I hate logging out of my main account to test purchases with my sandbox account.

Has anyone commenting actually tried it though? The multiple sign in link mentioned in the post does not show up on my Google account page.

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