I have a Google account, with Gmail enabled, that I set up for work purposes. For the sake of example, let's say it's catfoodwork@gmail.com
. I tried to create a separate Google account for personal stuff and called it catfoodpersonal@gmail.com
. Google told me that name was already taken.
Oh. I must have set that up in the past. Let me go do password recovery on it.
Great, now I have the password and I can log into catfoodpersonal
. It works and I'm in my work account. Huh. So I must have done something in the past to create what amounts to an alias to that work account. That wasn't what I wanted, because I was trying to get two completely separate mailboxes, but whatever.
Let me send a test email (from outside Google) to catfoodpersonal@gmail.com
. It bounces; there's no such address. So the extra linked alias catfoodpersonal
wasn't set up to receive email.
All right, now I'm totally confused. I can't find anything in the numerous Google account setup pages that shows me what aliases the account has. I can't see where one adds or removes aliases. I definitely can't figure out why the main account name receives email but the alias doesn't.
Long story short, the actual question: How does one add, change, and remove aliases or alternate login names for Google accounts? Secondarily, how does one make an alias eligible to receive email?
Best Answer
Did you use two different browsers to log into your two different accounts? I would suggest logging out, clearing your cookies and cache, and then trying to log in to the "personal" account again. I suspect that you will find that it is different to the "work" account. (Google allows you to access two different accounts at the same time in some products, including gmail - personally if find that it can be confusing.)