Dear Gmail – Using Multiple Sign-On Still Sucks
By on May 27th, 2012

I am a huge fan of Gmail, Google’s free email service, and have used it for many years for personal communications, as well as my consulting business. When I joined my previous employer, I was provided a Gmail account through Google Apps, which presented an interesting dilemma: I could not have both personal and work email open at the same time! Moreover, I was using Google Docs with my personal account as well as the work account, and I often found that I needed to access both at the same time. Shouldn’t have Google thought of this scenario? Frustrated with this seemingly unlikely challenge, I set out to figure out the best solution.

Using Two Browsers
My initial approach was to use Safari for personal email and Firefox for work. That worked very well, except that having two browsers opened with multiple tabs and other applications running seemed to slow down my computer considerably. Soon after, I began working on my startup company and had another Google Apps account to deal with, so I had to use a third browser for that – Google Chrome. Needless to say, my computer slowness has gotten much worse.

Multiple Sign-On
Through a friend, I happened to meet an engineer from Google, and I explained this dilemma to him. He told me that Gmail had a feature which allowed for multiple accounts to be configured and accessed within the same browser. I was shocked, because I had no idea that this was available! Google certainly didn’t promote this feature, even though with 4 million businesses using Google Apps, it could be important to tens of millions of people. After trying this feature, I realized it’s crippling limitations:

  • In order to open the 2nd profile, I usually had to do it two times. With the loading time of 10-15 seconds on each click, this seemed like an eternity
  • I was unable to use Google Docs from both accounts within the same browser.

Short of using three separate computers, it seems I have to suffer through the slowness of having three different browsers running at the same time. Google, are you hearing this? We need a solution soon!

About The Author
Greg Rublev is a dedicated web products geek and a technology blogger. When is not writing about Google Apps and backups he is busy working on LeanWagon, a startup helping people eat healthy and lose weight.

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  • Urreta

    Hi.

    I’ve the same problem and I found that Chrome have the option to create diferent users of gmail or apps emails. So you open a single window for each user and all tabs have that gmail user active. It uses a icon in the left top corner to let you know what user are you using. And you share your user configuration, bookmarks and passwords across diferent computers and mobiles with chome installed.

    Bye.

  • Mike M

    I could never get the multiple sign in working.
    I “solved” this in a few different ways.

    1: I always have chrome open, on a separate monitor, and I use it exclusively for gmail, gcal, and igoogle. All three tabs open automatically as soon as it runs. I use Firefox (on my main monitor) for all my other browsing.

    2: I aggregated all my email into one gmail account. I have set up server-level forwards from multiple gmail accounts, apps accounts, and imap/pop3 accounts (around 10 or so) all into one global gmail account. That account has “send from” accounts set up so I can respond using any account I want, but normally, just replying automatically replies from the correct account. I send through the appropriate account’s SMTP server thus removing the “on behalf of” that people see if you use gmail’s smtp to send mail from other accounts and this also hides your global email address. All the incoming email is labeled with an account specific label using rules.

  • Mike M

    I forgot to mention…A friend just told me this, use Chrome’s Incognito mode. You can log into at least two accounts this way..(one in the regular browser and one incognito) I haven’t tried more than 2, but it works with two.

 
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