Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Using Multiple Email Addresses With Google Account

I guess many people own a Gmail account. All gmail account comes with a Google Account. With a Google account, you can sign up for a number of Google services (e.g. Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, Youtube, ...). Did you know that you can sign up for a Google account without a Gmail address? Suppose you have a Yahoo mail account, you can still use your Yahoo email address to register for a Google account.

Why would I want to do that? Well, managing multiple accounts can be a hassle. I have separate Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Twitter, company email, ... accounts. Sometime 1 single inbox/email address is all I need. I feel that the world will be a better place if I can just maintain a single acount for all services. Projects like OpenID also provide similar convenient.

Google gives you freedom. It does not force you to use Gmail. In fact you can even forward all emails, sent to your Gmail address, to any other email address you want. You can use your existing (non Google) email address to sign up for a Google account. And this Google account can be linked to multiple email addresses.


From Blog
Settings for various Google services can be found at https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount. You might have noticed I have associated my Google account with 5 email addresses. When I arrived at any website (e.g. Youtube) that requires login with my Google account, I can just type in any 1 of the addresses associated with my account.

Suppose you have bought a domain name (e.g. mydomain.com), and created a Google Apps account to manage it. You already have a Gmail address and used it to access your Blogger, Youtube, Picasa services. This is how you can use you existing Google services with your new domain name:
  1. Create a new personalized email address (e.g. myname@mydomain.com) through the Google Apps Dashboard
  2. (Optional) Forward all your mail from myname@mydomain.com to your existing Gmail inbox. In this way, you only have to maintain 1 inbox.
  3. Associate this new email address to you existing Google account (as shown in earlier picture).
  4. Now you can sign in to your existing Google services with the new email address.
Reference:

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