Gmail – Same user with different name for Gmail and YouTube

GMail does not directly allow you to set alternative name to your email address but there is a trick.

First, you need to know that if your email address is abc@domain.com, if someone sends an email to abc+def@domain.com the email will still reach your inbox. The +def part is called "address tag" (click here for wikipedia article) and it allows you to have variations of your email address for purposes like filtering etc. But for your case we are going to use it to assign different names.

Steps:

1. Open your GMail settings page and go to the "Accounts" tab.
2. In "Send mail as" section, click on "Add another email address you own" link.
3. In the popup window, type in the alternative name that you wants in the first input field, and your email address with address tag in the second input field (e.g bobthebuilder+work@gmail.com or bobthebuilder+cool@gmail.com)
4. Save.
5. Now you can start using the alternative name by selecting it from the "From" field in the compose page.
6. Replies will still go to your inbox.
7. As a bonus, you can assign different label to incoming emails based on which email address they are sent to (e.g. green for bobthebuilder+work@gmail.com, red for bobthebuilder+cool@gmail.com).

Hope this helps!

It seems quite incredible but this little trick WORKS:

1. Log out of both Gmail and YouTube.
2. Open a browser tab with the Gmail login page.
3. Open a browser tab with the YouTube login page.
4. Fill in your user credentials in each login page, but DO NOT log in yet. Make sure the text cursor is in the password field on both login pages.
5. Switch to the YouTube login page and press Enter to log in.
6. Quickly switch to the Gmail login page and press Enter to log in.

Note: Experiment which first to login, Google or Youtube. The correct order changes.

[ All credit goes to Brother Lobster from a Google forum thread ]

I've tried it in Vivaldi and Firefox, stable situation of being logged in, with one Google account on YouTube and another on Google, for a few weeks now; does NOT seem to work in Chrome.