Thanks google, still annoying for multiple-email addresses

Posted by james on Feb 23, 2010 8:15 PM

I use gmail, and love it. I have no less than 10 different "From" emails that I can send mail as, for my different roles in different companies/friends/public/private, etc. And I have even more emails that all forward into my mailbox. This is great.

However, I also use google docs, calendar, and chat. These are amazing tools that do note work with multiple emails. I just got a calendar invite from someone to my @something.com email. However, I want to use it with my gmail, which is an @gmail.com account. I receive the email in my @gmail.com inbox, I can click on the link, but then I'm forced to log into my @something.com google account to see that calendar.

I don't want to do that. I want to add this calendar to my main gmail account. I can't do that without telling the person to resend another invite to my @gmail.com account. So even though they may email me at james@business.com, or james@personalwebsite.com, I'll have to tell them "Please resend to embarassing_personal_email@gmail.com account."

The same goes for google docs and chat. I constantly get confusion over what my "real" email is. It's definitely not the one I keep sending around to people so they can add me to their google chat/talk/docs/calendar apps.

So there's google apps for domains, which seems like it should handle this quite nicely. Instead of @gmail.com, it directly handles an @mydomain.com account. It also works for docs and calendar. Great! Except--- it DOESN'T SUPPORT CHAT!!! What the heck??

Plus, there's the glaring fact that I still cannot have a single account with my @personal.com calendar invites and my @business.com calendar invites all in the same place.

What google really needs are account aliases. Forget google apps for domains, which is a 60% solution. Just give me the ability to add "james@business.com" to my existing "something@gmail.com" account, and then I can use that for ALL their apps where I would normally use my gmail.com address. So people can chat with me at james@business.com or james@personal.com, and the same with docs / calendar / email. On my end they'll all dump into the same "inbox" (or calendar, or chat window, etc) and I can then choose to filter to different inboxes (like gmail), or leave it all merged.

This would solve so much. Please google. Clean up your mess!