6 ms·

If google wants me to use and depend on their services they need to take google apps for domains seriously. I have three google apps for domains accounts, and

by paddy_m 14y ago

If google wants me to use and depend on their services they need to take google apps for domains seriously. I have three google apps for domains accounts, and a regular gmail account. One apps for domain account is tied to my job, another my personal domain, a third to a former job/personal domain that I registered services with. I used my gmail account to access services that google doesn't make available on google apps for domains. It seems that no matter which google service I'm using, I'm logged into the wrong account. I frequently can't log out from the other account properly on the login page so I have to go back to a mail interface. It is an utter mess. I don't care about google connecting the dots and realizing that I'm the same person in all the places. They make it so frustratingly hard to use and depend on their services that I'm actively looking for alternatives. Linkedin handles it fine, when someone tries to friend me on my professional email address with linkedin, they know that I'm the same person. Google+ doesn't. I don't have a Google+ account on my preferred email account because I can't figure out how to enable it for that domain. I get Google+ friend requests regularly on every email address I have.

raldi 14y ago
> It seems that no matter which google service I'm using, I'm logged into the wrong account. Can you give an example of a series of actions that leads to this? I'm logged into two separate Google accounts at pretty much all times, and I never run into trouble. I'm curious as to what the difference is between our two usage patterns.
- rjd 14y ago
  This happens to me all the time, my company hasn't allowed youtube (plus a swathe of other stuff). But youtube gets me annoyed the most. I usually get a hyped 'check this out' friend a friend on IM, then I have to spend what feels like an absurd amount of time swapping accounts and fighting against chrome modals which is always prompting the wrong account details for login. When I'm finished I have to log out and back into my work account. Total pain.
  - raldi 14y ago
    When you're logged into your work account (say, in GMail), does the URL contain /u/0 or /u/1? And how about your personal account? Whichever one says /u/0 is the first one you logged in as, and that will be the default if you, say, open a new tab and paste in a bare link (without /u/ in it). If you want that to be your personal account, you can make that your /u/0 account by doing this: 1. Log out of all your Google accounts 2. Log into your personal account 3. Click the picture in the upper-right 4. Click "add account" 5. Log into your work account
    - rjd 14y ago
      No way am I merging my work accounts, my personal business accounts, and my junk email together. Especially with a company already proven to slap happy deleting accounts they don't like.
      - raldi 14y ago
        Regarding your first sentence: Those instructions don't merge anything. All they do is swap the order of two accounts that someone is using multilogin with. Regarding your second: Citation needed. There's this persistent rumor that if you make a G+ account with a fake-sounding name, Google will lock you out of your GMail and erase all your Google Docs, but as far as I've seen, those rumors have never checked out.
  - lucian1900 14y ago
    A quicker workaround might be an incognito tab.
- jgw 14y ago
  For what it's worth, I do the same thing and have never run into trouble in years... ...until two or three days ago. GMail flat-out refused to let me log into two accounts (it would end up in endless redirect when I tried the second one - I quit Chrome, fully cleared cookies, history, everything... it just would not work) It seemed to have cleared up by the following day.
  - silverbax88 14y ago
    That's very similar to a bug YouTube has had for a while. It may be corrected - was still an issue within the past two months - but you would get into a loop where you could not log in to YouTube. These types of things are what I think about when people tell me how great the Google programmers are, but that's another topic.
- flatline 14y ago
  It seems to happen when a session expires for one of the accounts. I keep my browser open for long periods and almost never reboot, and also have two accounts open, a gmail account and a school account. Generally there is no problem, but... Scenario 1) I have both open, and log out of my gmail account. It redirects to my school's "goodbye" page. I just reproduced this. Not a huge problem, but indicative of a bigger issue. Scenario 2) Now log out of the school account. I am greeted with a login for my gmail account. This is pretty close to the problem in Scenario 3, below. Scenario 3) The real issue. The problem is not so much that it has happened, it's that there is no way to recover if you don't have the password. The other week I logged into my wife's laptop to grab a document from gmail to print, since it was hooked up to the printer. She didn't use it for the next few days. When she went to her work email's address (a .gov domain), it prompted her for my gmail password. There was no way to 'change account' at that point. No way to log out. Go to the .gov domain, get a prompt to login as <me>@gmail.com. No way to authenticate. I couldn't figure it out, and finally just logged in as myself then logged out, after which I was redirected to the .gov boodbye page, but it allowed her to log in after that. Edit: Scenario 4) Go to www.gmail.com/a/umbc.edu, which the google help pages say is the correct way to go to the school's site. I just tried this, and it sent me to my gmail.com inbox. It is pretty much a crap shoot which mailbox I get when I first load the page. Sometimes it's aware I'm signed in under different IDs, sometimes not, so I can't always change accounts, and must go through login/logout hell to get them clear. Perhaps I could just clear my cookies but I don't like doing this en masse.
  - saraid216 14y ago
    Yeah, there's something weird about the URLs to do with users. I've found myself regularly removing the /u/1/ part of G+ permalinks, for instance, which indicates that the user is being tracked oddly.
rachelbythebay 14y ago
http://giveupandusemultiplebrowsers.com/ http://giveupandusemultiplebrowsers.com/ I found this back in 2009, maybe 2010, when I was still "on the inside" and shared it around internally. Some people got a real kick out of it. Now consider this: every single employee has a corp account, and I would think nearly every employee has a personal account, too. That means problems stemming from being in the right account have probably popped up in every single person's face for years now. It didn't help when they changed from having the u@h up to just a name. Great. I know my name. I need to know which account I'm in. Sorry.
- onemorepassword 14y ago
  This is pretty much what I do to circumvent the utter mess Google makes of it's logins. It's also a matter of privacy. It has happened to me more than once that I did something like watching YouTube videos in the privacy of my own home, only to find out I was still logged into my company Google Apps account, which of course records my history.
- Groxx 14y ago
  Chrome makes it quite a bit easier with multiple user accounts - go to settings, scroll down, and add a user. You can run multiple at the same time (each gets its own window, can spawn new ones, etc), and they all have separate settings, extensions, etc. Very highly recommended if you're a Chrome user. If you're on Firefox... seems like they only really care if you use their Profile Manager, which is a horrible alternative, but it does work reliably across all versions as long as you never ever ever launch the browser directly. Or if you don't mind rewinding time a bit, and using OSX, http://www.stainlessapp.com/ http://www.stainlessapp.com/ (assuming it still works) has a brilliant idea: bookmarks can be associated with sessions. Have one for each account, run them all side-by-side in tabs, and it works great. I wish every browser would do this.
- modeless 14y ago
  That site is a little outdated because Chrome now natively supports multiple user profiles. Each profile gets its own icon and there's a user profile switcher next to your tabs. It's by far the best solution to the multiple accounts issue.
xnxn 14y ago
At least you have the Gmail address you want. My desired username is in a "reserved" state, or something, in that it's linked to my account under "other usernames", and I can log in with it, but I can't create a Gmail account for it. This all started when I decided to try Lively, of all things. It prompted me for a username, but I never would have entered what I did if I knew that that username would become the permanent name of my Google account.
- paddy_m 14y ago
  I don't have the desired gmail that I want. my desired email is paddy@paddymullen.com. my gmail account has a ".gm" appended to the end to get a unique name.
mckoss 14y ago
I would have agreed with you several years ago - but Google has vastly improved this across their services over the last two years. There are still holes, but I now can switch accounts in a single drop-down on most Google sites I use. I still have problems with Google Wallet (aka Checkout) and Analytics seems to have it's own multi-account sign-in system.
- jrockway 14y ago
  One important thing to note about Wallet is that it will ask you to reauthenticate every 20 minutes. If that's not the problem, feel free to send me an email about it, and I'll do what I can to get it fixed (jrockway AT google.com).
esrauch 14y ago
Chrome profiles solves this problem for me.
tomkarlo 14y ago
I don't think there's many Google services any more where you can't use your apps for domains account. I stopped using my @gmail account years ago - in fact, I gave it to my father - and I can't remember having a problem using my Apps account. (Maybe with Google+ when it first came out?)
mkingston 14y ago
It'll only partly solve your problem, but you can have one profile current in incognito and another current in your normal window. This is what I do when someone wants to quickly check their fb/gmail while I'm logged in.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
natrius 14y ago
The split between a personal Google Apps account and a plain old GMail account was the worst for me. Anyone who lived through the era where Google Apps accounts weren't full-fledged Google accounts is in the same boat. The way I solved the problem is by not using my personal Google Apps account anymore. I forward the email to a GMail account and use that for all Google services. Google Now was the main reason I made the switch. It only supports one account, and it was easier to move my email and calendar that it would've been to move Voice and everything else.
- jrockway 14y ago
  There is a tool for moving Google Voice accounts between Google accounts: http://support.google.com/voice/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1378507&page=ts.cs http://support.google.com/voice/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1... I did this when I first started using Apps and the process went very smoothly.
scottbartell 14y ago
It's kind of a major design flaw.. I'm getting pretty sick of having to educate everyone on which email address is associated with my... "main" Google+ account.

by paddy_m 14y ago

raldi 14y ago

> It seems that no matter which google service I'm using, I'm logged into the wrong account. Can you give an example of a series of actions that leads to this? I'm logged into two separate Google accounts at pretty much all times, and I never run into trouble. I'm curious as to what the difference is between our two usage patterns.

rjd 14y ago
This happens to me all the time, my company hasn't allowed youtube (plus a swathe of other stuff). But youtube gets me annoyed the most. I usually get a hyped 'check this out' friend a friend on IM, then I have to spend what feels like an absurd amount of time swapping accounts and fighting against chrome modals which is always prompting the wrong account details for login. When I'm finished I have to log out and back into my work account. Total pain.
- raldi 14y ago
  When you're logged into your work account (say, in GMail), does the URL contain /u/0 or /u/1? And how about your personal account? Whichever one says /u/0 is the first one you logged in as, and that will be the default if you, say, open a new tab and paste in a bare link (without /u/ in it). If you want that to be your personal account, you can make that your /u/0 account by doing this: 1. Log out of all your Google accounts 2. Log into your personal account 3. Click the picture in the upper-right 4. Click "add account" 5. Log into your work account
  - rjd 14y ago
    No way am I merging my work accounts, my personal business accounts, and my junk email together. Especially with a company already proven to slap happy deleting accounts they don't like.
    - raldi 14y ago
      Regarding your first sentence: Those instructions don't merge anything. All they do is swap the order of two accounts that someone is using multilogin with. Regarding your second: Citation needed. There's this persistent rumor that if you make a G+ account with a fake-sounding name, Google will lock you out of your GMail and erase all your Google Docs, but as far as I've seen, those rumors have never checked out.
- lucian1900 14y ago
  A quicker workaround might be an incognito tab.
jgw 14y ago
For what it's worth, I do the same thing and have never run into trouble in years... ...until two or three days ago. GMail flat-out refused to let me log into two accounts (it would end up in endless redirect when I tried the second one - I quit Chrome, fully cleared cookies, history, everything... it just would not work) It seemed to have cleared up by the following day.
- silverbax88 14y ago
  That's very similar to a bug YouTube has had for a while. It may be corrected - was still an issue within the past two months - but you would get into a loop where you could not log in to YouTube. These types of things are what I think about when people tell me how great the Google programmers are, but that's another topic.
flatline 14y ago
It seems to happen when a session expires for one of the accounts. I keep my browser open for long periods and almost never reboot, and also have two accounts open, a gmail account and a school account. Generally there is no problem, but... Scenario 1) I have both open, and log out of my gmail account. It redirects to my school's "goodbye" page. I just reproduced this. Not a huge problem, but indicative of a bigger issue. Scenario 2) Now log out of the school account. I am greeted with a login for my gmail account. This is pretty close to the problem in Scenario 3, below. Scenario 3) The real issue. The problem is not so much that it has happened, it's that there is no way to recover if you don't have the password. The other week I logged into my wife's laptop to grab a document from gmail to print, since it was hooked up to the printer. She didn't use it for the next few days. When she went to her work email's address (a .gov domain), it prompted her for my gmail password. There was no way to 'change account' at that point. No way to log out. Go to the .gov domain, get a prompt to login as <me>@gmail.com. No way to authenticate. I couldn't figure it out, and finally just logged in as myself then logged out, after which I was redirected to the .gov boodbye page, but it allowed her to log in after that. Edit: Scenario 4) Go to www.gmail.com/a/umbc.edu, which the google help pages say is the correct way to go to the school's site. I just tried this, and it sent me to my gmail.com inbox. It is pretty much a crap shoot which mailbox I get when I first load the page. Sometimes it's aware I'm signed in under different IDs, sometimes not, so I can't always change accounts, and must go through login/logout hell to get them clear. Perhaps I could just clear my cookies but I don't like doing this en masse.
- saraid216 14y ago
  Yeah, there's something weird about the URLs to do with users. I've found myself regularly removing the /u/1/ part of G+ permalinks, for instance, which indicates that the user is being tracked oddly.

rachelbythebay 14y ago

http://giveupandusemultiplebrowsers.com/ http://giveupandusemultiplebrowsers.com/ I found this back in 2009, maybe 2010, when I was still "on the inside" and shared it around internally. Some people got a real kick out of it. Now consider this: every single employee has a corp account, and I would think nearly every employee has a personal account, too. That means problems stemming from being in the right account have probably popped up in every single person's face for years now. It didn't help when they changed from having the u@h up to just a name. Great. I know my name. I need to know which account I'm in. Sorry.

onemorepassword 14y ago
This is pretty much what I do to circumvent the utter mess Google makes of it's logins. It's also a matter of privacy. It has happened to me more than once that I did something like watching YouTube videos in the privacy of my own home, only to find out I was still logged into my company Google Apps account, which of course records my history.
Groxx 14y ago
Chrome makes it quite a bit easier with multiple user accounts - go to settings, scroll down, and add a user. You can run multiple at the same time (each gets its own window, can spawn new ones, etc), and they all have separate settings, extensions, etc. Very highly recommended if you're a Chrome user. If you're on Firefox... seems like they only really care if you use their Profile Manager, which is a horrible alternative, but it does work reliably across all versions as long as you never ever ever launch the browser directly. Or if you don't mind rewinding time a bit, and using OSX, http://www.stainlessapp.com/ http://www.stainlessapp.com/ (assuming it still works) has a brilliant idea: bookmarks can be associated with sessions. Have one for each account, run them all side-by-side in tabs, and it works great. I wish every browser would do this.
modeless 14y ago
That site is a little outdated because Chrome now natively supports multiple user profiles. Each profile gets its own icon and there's a user profile switcher next to your tabs. It's by far the best solution to the multiple accounts issue.

xnxn 14y ago

At least you have the Gmail address you want. My desired username is in a "reserved" state, or something, in that it's linked to my account under "other usernames", and I can log in with it, but I can't create a Gmail account for it. This all started when I decided to try Lively, of all things. It prompted me for a username, but I never would have entered what I did if I knew that that username would become the permanent name of my Google account.

paddy_m 14y ago
I don't have the desired gmail that I want. my desired email is paddy@paddymullen.com. my gmail account has a ".gm" appended to the end to get a unique name.

mckoss 14y ago

I would have agreed with you several years ago - but Google has vastly improved this across their services over the last two years. There are still holes, but I now can switch accounts in a single drop-down on most Google sites I use. I still have problems with Google Wallet (aka Checkout) and Analytics seems to have it's own multi-account sign-in system.

jrockway 14y ago
One important thing to note about Wallet is that it will ask you to reauthenticate every 20 minutes. If that's not the problem, feel free to send me an email about it, and I'll do what I can to get it fixed (jrockway AT google.com).

esrauch 14y ago

Chrome profiles solves this problem for me.

tomkarlo 14y ago

I don't think there's many Google services any more where you can't use your apps for domains account. I stopped using my @gmail account years ago - in fact, I gave it to my father - and I can't remember having a problem using my Apps account. (Maybe with Google+ when it first came out?)

mkingston 14y ago

It'll only partly solve your problem, but you can have one profile current in incognito and another current in your normal window. This is what I do when someone wants to quickly check their fb/gmail while I'm logged in.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

natrius 14y ago

The split between a personal Google Apps account and a plain old GMail account was the worst for me. Anyone who lived through the era where Google Apps accounts weren't full-fledged Google accounts is in the same boat. The way I solved the problem is by not using my personal Google Apps account anymore. I forward the email to a GMail account and use that for all Google services. Google Now was the main reason I made the switch. It only supports one account, and it was easier to move my email and calendar that it would've been to move Voice and everything else.

jrockway 14y ago
There is a tool for moving Google Voice accounts between Google accounts: http://support.google.com/voice/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1378507&page=ts.cs http://support.google.com/voice/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1... I did this when I first started using Apps and the process went very smoothly.

scottbartell 14y ago

It's kind of a major design flaw.. I'm getting pretty sick of having to educate everyone on which email address is associated with my... "main" Google+ account.