Careful With Your Google Account When Setting Up A Gmail Account!

Well, I just had a time of it.  I set up a gmail account for a client at least I thought I did.

Then I noticed, everytime I was in ‘my’ google accounts, anywhere, there was the client’s gmail sitting at the top of the screen.  Okay! what is going on here?

I originally set up my Google account with an email that was not a gmail account and I’d recently changed that to another email that wasn’t a gmail account.

I started looking and there was my client’s gmail account as my primary email and so it was the username for my account with Google. I was not sure how this happened.

Google help files can be very good at times but this was not one of those times.

I followed the instructions Google had, to change this to my original account and couldn’t.  I couldn’t add a new email and password as they said in the instructions, I didn’t have that option.  Apparently you only get that option when you have a non-gmail account as your username.

What I had to do was remove the gmail account.  I did this by going to my Google account and next to Products there is an Edit option, click on that and there is an option to remove Gmail account permanently.  When you take that option you will be asked for a new email address, submit your old one and all should be well.  If it won’t accept the old email address then get another one, not gmail, try one connected to your domain name, anything except gmail.

Long storey short, don’t add a gmail account to your Google Account if you have a non gmail email address as your username.

So be very careful when you are setting up a gmail address that you are in the Gmail section and not the Google Accounts section.  I couldn’t find anywhere that Google says if you already have a Google account with a username being a non gmail email and add a gmail to your Google account that it will take over from your non gmail username.

Google did come to the rescue, in a roundabout sort of way, I finished up Googling my problem and thankfully other people had done the same thing.

In the Google Accounts Help section, I know I left behind a lot of ‘No’ radio buttons ticked as the answers were not helpful.  I dare say it wouldn’t have been so much of a problem if it had been a gmail account for myself not a client’s.  I’ll be much more careful in the future.

Take care

Cheers
Carmel