

Fixing the Google account alias problem - suraj
http://www.equalsdrummond.name/?p=267

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ryandvm
Google has a real problem with account management right now. That somebody has
to grok all this to use Google's services is bizarre.

What's worse is that this doesn't even mention the third and entirely separate
class of accounts - Google Apps Accounts. We use Google Apps Premier Edition
and it boggles my mind that to this day, Google does not allow Apps users to
log into the majority of Google's products with their Apps account. _sigh_

~~~
sstrudeau
Agreed. Every app seems to have a slightly different
authentication/authorization/identity model. Docs works differently than
Analytics, works differently than Ad Manager, works differently than
Feedburner. I'm currently managing 3 "Google Accounts" right now to work-
around these mismatched identity patterns and am using one _shared_ Google
Account to manage Feedburner, which has a one:one Google Account:Feed pattern
(which really irks me). Webmaster Tools is also one:one but at least you can
independently authorize multiple accounts...

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blasdel
The way this interacts with Analytics is especially confusing: if any of your
"additional email addresses" have permissions on Analytics domains, the
accounts get effectively consolidated.

Logging in with either my personal or work email was logging me into what
looked like my personal account. It turns out that they both just defaulted to
showing the same domain.

For added confusion, Analytics has its own built-in system for
sharing+consolidating permissions across accounts.

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AndrewDucker
It gets even more confusing if you have a Google Apps for Domains. I've had
andrew@ducker.org.uk for my Google ID for a fair while before I got them to
manage the email/calendar/etc. for ducker.org.uk - at which point calendaring
got a bit complex for a few days - and it took me a while to get sharing set
up again properly.

Some of this stuff really doesn't seem that well thought out, to be honest.

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dmd
For the specific Docs problem mentioned, you can also just truncate the URL to
not include the email address the doc was shared with, and presto, Docs will
let you in. Only the shared secret matters.

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avinashv
The whole Google Account vs. Gmail account thing _is_ confusing for people who
never started off with Gmail. I did, and so things sort of "fell into place"
for a lot of this very quickly on as Google started rolling out more features.

I suspect that the Google team expects/prefers that all Google Account holders
are using a Gmail address as their primary email. I feel like that is the idea
of the consolidated "persona" that the author mentions at the end of the post.

On a side note: the capitalized section headers of that blog are offensively
large.

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wallflower
> You can use alternate email addresses to sign in to your Google Account,
> recover your password, and more.

Since a lot of us rely on Google apps, I strongly recommend if you use one -
that your alternate email address cannot be compromised by weak password reset
rules (e.g. a web email provider like HoTMaiL that has guessable secret
questions). Ideally, you would use a more-secure email (company email that
requires VPN and/or two-factor authentication).

