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Comment by kristofferR | Hacker News Reader

That's a massive shame.

Weird that Mailbox/Dropbox manages to do it with Gmail, but Google doesn't.

I believe it's intentional (for privacy/usability reasons), so that it's always clear which account's emails you are reading and which you are replying to. I don't think it's a technical issue.

I've certainly been caught out in that regard before.

But a 'advanced options' ability with a stern warning would be useful to many.

In general Google tends to keep accounts siloed, if for no other reason than that different accounts is the solution recommended to people who want to silo things.

Why don't you just have your emails forwarded from one account to another?

That defeats the point of separate emails...

Not really, given that you can quite easily filter emails that you receive from your other address. I use exactly this workflow and it's much more useful than having them in separate inboxes (i.e. doesn't "defeat the purpose").

I tried it and found I constantly was sending email from the wrong account. While that's on me, it was evident I was never going to get it right either, so I went back to separate accounts.

To do the trick, you have to add the account as "not an alias" (you will have to add the gmail smpt and so) and later, select the reply "Reply from the same address to which the message was sent".

I did that. It was remembering to switch the account when composing new messages. I ended up sending work emails from my personal account on a few occasions.

I meant going to Accounts and choosing the "Reply from... radio". That way it will always choose the "destination email" as reply.

Right. That works great. The problem is when I was composing a new email.

Just in case you didn't see it, and weren't just talking about composing new emails, there is an option in the settings to send replies from the account that received the email.

Thanks. That was a very handy feature. Alas, it was when composing new emails. I'm sure with more diligence it'll come as second nature. But when rapid firing through emails I'd sometimes send from the wrong account and end up in confusing and embarrassing situations.

I bet his university's Gmail has auto-lookup for contacts.

Mailbox is an all-in-one email client. Gmail is a webmail client for your (singular) Gmail account.

Gmail on mobile (both Android and iOS) both handle multiple Gmail accounts gracefully (personal, google apps, etc). To merge them seamlessly in the interface would be trivial.

In this case I was talking about Inbox, which in my mind should be a all-in-one gmail inbox.

To my understanding, the future of "enterprise support" for Android is that you'll be able to install multiple copies of the same app and one will be personal and the other work.

This is how BlackBerry 10 devices handle the difference between personal and work applications. Al though, it's just one application running two instances with app data in two different locations.

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