OT: Google account versus Gmail confusion

Apologies for straying OT but I'd greatly appreciate some
not-too-technical help in unscrambling my brain please. I'm quite confused
about how to setup and manage Google Mail and (eventually) other Google
'Apps' like Contacts etc. Alternatively, is there a newsgroup or forum
others can recommend for this sort of query please?

Ideally I'd like to start afresh, but so far see no way to do that. As a
good second best I'd like to ensure I have just one 'Google Account'
(which I gather is an entity in its own right, separate from Google email
accounts), plus one GMail account (or GoogleMail - they seem aliases).

I want to be able to use this 'account' and any associated email
address(es) on my PC and on my smartphone.

But when I go to my 'main' Google account on my PC and then try to go to
Gmail, I get messages I don't follow, as shown here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4019461/Google Account+GmailConfusion.jpg

Others (e.g. my son, a Google enthusiast) seem to use all this stuff with
casual ease, But to me, it all seems to be hopelessly complicated!

 

I made some progress. I ended up creating new Google account and adding
various 'services' or whatever they're called to it, such as Gmail and
Calendar. But that leaves me with an earlier Google account which has
Gmail and Groups, with 8 groups that would be tedious to re-create.

So I'm hoping someone here with some know how on these Google web accounts
can tell me how I can CONSOLIDATE these into one Google account please.

 

Don't think you can consolidate two Google/Gmail accounts. However, what
you can do is go to Settings, Forwarding & POP/IMAP for either account and
then set 'forward a copy of incoming mail' to the other account. This way,
all your incoming emails will end up in just one account (whichever you
chose). I find this facility works very effectively.

Hope this helps,

V

 

Thanks Victor, I'll give that a try. Further research reinforces your
conclusion. Although you can now have both accounts open at the same time,
following some sort of recent upgrade.

 

Email used to be so much simpler ... ;-(

 

It still is, really.
Either be happy with your ISP-related email address or set up a domain
and/or various Hotmail/Gmail addresses as "throw-aways", as required.
Both of the above systems have excellent anti-spam features, by the way.
If you have an existing Gmail account in the name of, say
which you don't want to use, just set up another one
in the name of, say. and tell your contacts to use
the new one from now on.

No probs, really...

George

 

Meanwhile, at the uk.telecom.broadband Job Justification Hearings, George
Weston chose the tried and tested strategy of:

There are other tricks you can do with . and + before the @ and use these to
filter incoming mail:

<http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-
your.html>

 

Thanks both. Well, maybe it will all indeed seem perfectly simple once I
get stable operation!

However, I've made progress by eliminating two Google accounts. (Although
a downside is that one, set up a couple of years ago, gave me access to
about a dozen Google Groups, so I'll have to re-enter those in my one
remaining account).

But I'm now getting DUPLICATES of emails sent to my main (Pipex) address.
The extra copy is being served via Gmail, but so far I haven't figured out
exactly why.

I THOUGHT it was probably down to this setting

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4019461/GMailSettings-1.jpg

but apparently not, because after deleting it I'm still getting the
unwanted copy. And I don't think it can be because POP is enabled?

I'm beginning to think it may be that I had some setting within one of the
Google accounts I deleted that is still lingering on. The small print
about account deletion says that usernames used are NOT freed up after
deletion (and I confirmed that by trying to switch from terrypingm to
), so perhaps this is another 'deleted but not quite
dead' issue?

 

Thanks Phil, I'll investigate that tomorrow.