I do not understand the way Google handles their accounts. I have (well, had) two Google accounts: a gmail account (david.b.carlton) that I never used and another account (associated to my public e-mail address) that I use all the time for reading blogs. On the recommendation of some friends, I decided to start using Google as a spam filter, forwarding my mail through their servers; to that end, the natural thing to do would be to unify those accounts, tell the gmail account to forward non-spam mail to my public e-mail address, and bask in the drastically reduced volume of spam that I receive. (Along with some procmail rules on my public account to route e-mail through gmail unless gmail has seen it already.)
Well, no. Some issues that turned up:
- You can’t unify an existing gmail account and an existing Google account associated with a non-gmail e-mail address.
- You also can’t do that indirectly by deleting the gmail account and then creating a new gmail account with the same e-mail address as the previous one but with the new gmail account linked to the existing Google account: even if you’ve deleted a gmail account, you (or anybody else) still can’t create a new gmail account with the same name.
- If a gmail account is linked to an external e-mail address, gmail gets extraordinarily possessive of the latter e-mail address: it refuses to forward e-mail to that address, and it also refuses to forward e-mail that was originally sent from that address.
The upshot is that, after an hour and a half of frustration, I ended up where I started: I still have a Google account that I use all the time linked to my public e-mail address, I have a separate gmail account (which is now forwarding mail to my public e-mail address), but that separate gmail account has a name that I like somewhat less than the name of my first gmail account. (Or, for that matter, than the name of a second gmail account that I created but was then unable to use for the purposes that I wanted.)
I’m actually a little sympathetic to their behavior on the first two issues: the first smells to me like legacy implementation headaches, and I can see how their decision on the second issue avoids a certain class of problems. But their behavior on the third issue just seems like a conscious choice of bizarreness: why refuse to forward to the one external address that I’m guaranteeing is mine? Just because I have an account with Google to use their services doesn’t mean that I’m handing all control of my e-mail over to them…
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Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on GMail or Google accounts. If I knew anything non-public about them, I couldn’t tell you.
Issue #1 arises because an email address is an identity for lots of purposes, not just GMail. If there were an interface for proving that two email addresses represented the same person, there would then be a difficult problem of how to merge the accounts: the mailboxes, the GMail settings, the calendars and their settings (if any), Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and gobs of other Google applications. That would be a very hard problem.
Issue #2 is evidently an anti-spoofing defense. If I could hijack your system long enough to delete your account (the simplest way is to be a friend of yours and do it from your computer) and then recreate it, I could grab incoming mail and generate fake outgoing mail, although presumably that wouldn’t give me access to your stored mail, calendars, etc. Even a limited spoofing scenario is bad enough that it’s worthwhile to make sure that Google accounts are never re-created.
Issue #3 I don’t understand very well, but I’d guess it has something to do with preventing email loops due to bad configuration somewhere, whereby Google forwards mail to the linked account which forwards it back to Google.
Documentation about all this could doubtless be improved a whole lot.
1/26/2008 @ 9:22 pm
Thanks for the information!
1/26/2008 @ 9:32 pm
What I did is to set my gmail account to POP off mail from my private account. Then I enable IMAP on my gmail account, but told my IMAP client that my email address was my private email address, not my gmail address. This is re-enforced by emailing out through a private SMTP server, not a gmail server.
This gives me what I want: an out-sourced, anti-spam-managed inbox, on my private domain, with the benefits of gmail’s huge storage.
I’ve only been doing this for a few weeks, but it’s working well enough that I feel brave enough to convert the wife’s email to the same setup.
1/28/2008 @ 12:28 pm
Huh, interesting.
Right now, I’m routing e-mail through gmail, but having it sent both to and from my private e-mail. I’ve been doing it for all of two days now, but I really like the results, in terms of spam filtering: I didn’t like the hour and a half of figuring out why various configurations failed mysteriously, but now that it’s working, it works great. And I send e-mail through the private server.
Having said that, I don’t really know why I’m sending the e-mail back to my private server, instead of fetching it (via either IMAP or POP, I’m currently using a workflow where it doesn’t matter) from gmail directly. So I may switch to something closer to what you’re doing.
1/28/2008 @ 12:54 pm
Well regarding Issue #1, Windows Live Mail seems to be doing it, you can unify two accounts and you can seamlessly switch between them..
11/1/2008 @ 1:16 pm
Compared with Yahoo’s new email interface, gmail is about a few miles behind. At the end of the day, an email system providing highest overall productivity and stability usually prevails. Today how many email systems most of us has to interface with? Probably more than one or two. An email user-interface behaves totally differently can be “unique”, it also causes confusions to users who use other normal email systems on daily basis. Gmail drains more brain power from email users, hurts overall productivity. Using gmail makes me feel like in Hongkong – you drive on the left of the road.
Stupid gmail? Can’t agree more!
11/13/2008 @ 8:30 pm