apocryph.org Notes to my future self

Pro Tip: Don’t ruin your Google Account with GMail

For years I’ve had a Google Account under my personal email account, anelson at apocryph. It so happens that anelson at apocryph is a mailbox on a Google Apps-hosted domain, so I get GMail-like email capabilities, but as far as Google Accounts is concerned it’s a third-party email address. I thought that was a little odd, particularly if you have different passwords for your Google Account vs your Google Apps email account, but it’s not hard once you know about the distinction.

This worked great for me. When I ran apps like Google Reader, anelson @ apocryph was in the top right corner, and all was well. Then I made a serious mistake. I had been playing with Picasa Web and I really wanted to mess around with the face recognition. I was having so much fun that I wanted to setup a Picasa username so I could share URLs with a meaningful URL. Unfortunately, your Picasa username is also your Gmail username, and since my Google Account was a third-party account, choosing a Picasa username was actually setting up a GMail account attached to my Google Account (but of course none of that was disclosed at the time).

I finally settled on ‘repugnax’ for my username, and then something bad happened. All of a sudden, anelson @ apocryph was a secondary address on my Google Account; the primary was ‘repugnax’ and could not be removed. When I logged in to Google services I had to do so as repugnax at gmail now, and that’s the address that appeared in the top right corner. Argh!

Without warning or recourse, my Google Account turned into a Gmail account. I had to grit my teeth every time I saw that repugnax at gmail address, because it’s so much uglier than anelson @ apocryph. When I assign names to faces in Picasa, none of my anelson at apocryph contacts are available, because it’s using the contacts under the repugnax at gmail account (which of course are empty). The same goes for other google services (like Reader) that use your GMail contacts. These are minor annoyances, so I’ve suffered silently up to this point.

Then I got my DROID smartphone. If you have a DROID you know that step #1 in setup is to give it a Google Account to use. It doesn’t tell you this explicitly, but the account you give it will have a special status as the primary account, and can’t be changed without reset to FACTORY DEFAULTS! Since I don’t use the repugnax mailbox for email, I gave it anelson at apocryph, which (oddly) worked even though it’s not an actual Google Account. I could get my anelson at apocryph email on my phone, so I was happy.

Until I wanted to play with Google Latitude. You see, the Latitude feature of the Maps application on the DROID silently uses your primary Google Account to update your location. But my primary account wasn’t a Google Account at all, but a Google Apps mailbox, so I couldn’t activate Latitude on the account, so it wouldn’t work. Even if I didn’t hate the repugnax account, in order to go back and make it my primary account I’d have to repave the phone, which I wasn’t about to do.

So I manned up, removed anelson at apocryph from the repugnax account, and created a new Google Account under anelson at apocryph. I then migrated my Google Reader subscriptions over, and it’s like it’s 2006 again. Google Latitude works and updates my anelson at apocryph Latitude profile, and I see the proper email address in the top right corner of the Google services I use.

Sadly, my Google Voice account is stuck with repugnax, probably forever. I sent a Google Wave invite to my new anelson at apocryph Google account, but step one is to pick a username, which is, you guessed it, actually code for provisioning a gmail account, so I can’t (or, more accurately, won’t) use Google Wave with my new account. It’s definitely not ideal. Why the hell does Google do things this way? I’ve read lots of complaints about it in the support forums, but they don’t seem to care. Oh, and merging two accounts? Fuck you. Can’t be done.

Given that Google services are free it’s probably a little weak to bitch about them, but I don’t care. This is bullshit and it should be fixed.