Gmail – Merging Conflicting Google Accounts

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I believe the answer is no, but I think that just having the question out there may let the community work together to figure out what we can do to get what we are looking for done.

My organization started using Google Apps for our internal email system and documents over a year ago now. As anyone who has ever used this system knows, at that time you couldn't use the same login to use software like Adwords or Analytics; you needed a personal login. Google was perfectly happy to let you use the same e-mail address that you used for your Apps account as a login.

Now they are telling me that is no longer the case, that we can use the Apps account to login to 'regular' Google. They describe it here: conflicting account overview.

However, their only solution is to rename your existing personal Google account. There is no way to just say "merge these accounts". I mean even all my Stack Exchange accounts are linked through my personal account with the same name as my Apps account. I don't want to start messing with my personal account, renaming it (which I assume I cant undo once they take over that login with my apps account) with the potential of messing up all sorts of things I didn't predict would get messed up like for example having to login to my personal Gmail (different name than my Apps account username from my organization) to get into Stack Exchange and a whole host of other sites.

Does anyone have any experience with merging, or just with this whole process in general? I just want my Gmail and Apps accounts with the same username to become one happy login!

Best Answer

It's not possible. I ran into the same problem, and spent many hours trying to merge things, and all I did was run into various Google bugs (for example, I can't use Google Groups at all anymore since it won't change my e-mail address). You're going to have to keep track of the two separate accounts, and you probably won't be able to associate your desired e-mail address with one of them.

A little bit of good news, some services can be migrated from one Google account to another (and Analytics and Adwords are among them): http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=58582