Tag Archives: google-apps

Google Buzz and the whole Google Accounts fiasco

February 10th, 2010

Yesterday Google began to release Google Buzz to its Gmail users. Buzz appears to be a compelling service – especially since it plugs right into something many of us use already. For more information about what Buzz is and does visit the Google Buzz site for a nice demo.

I can’t have much more of an opinion on Google Buzz because I can’t use it. You see, I use something called Google Apps for Domains. Google Apps allows me to have Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and other services by Google for the CDEVROE.com domain name. My colin [at] cdevroe.com email, in other words, is simply a glorified Gmail account. But, for some reason, Google handles these accounts completely separate from all other accounts.

Google Reader Header

Take Google Reader as an example. I use Google Reader everyday. On the top right hand side of Google Reader (see the image above and click on it to zoom in), where it tells me whom I’m logged in as, it says colin [at] cdevroe.com. One would think that would mean that my Google Apps account was being used to authenticate me for Google Reader. This isn’t so. On the left hand side of the page there is a link for Mail (presumably my Inbox). If I click on that it asks me to sign up for Gmail. Wait, what?

To make matters worse Google does this for all of its services. Google.com, Maps, Adsense, Analytics, and more. I have accounts for all of these (using my same email address) but I don’t have a Gmail account. I have a Google Apps Gmail account.

Chris Messina, someone whom I admire very much, recently went to work full time at the GOOG as an Open Web Advocate. I know he’ll be busy striving to get Google to become the foremost example in the open Web but I also know that he understands this whole Google Accounts fiasco as well if not better than I do. I hope that, while he’s changing the world from the inside out, he’s also able to convince those at Google to consolidate all Google Accounts into a single-account-sign-on-something-or-other.

I look forward to one day playing around with Buzz but I’ll wait until it is available in my Google Apps for Domains flavor of Gmail.

Addendum: So I thought I’d try my hand at following through the Gmail setup process to see if, like with Google Reader, it just used my colin [at] cdevroe.com account as its primary account. Now I have no idea what it did and I have a new email address and Google Profile that are unrelated to my normal Apps account but it is linked to it somehow. I’m a professional Internet user and developer and I have absolutely no idea what Google is trying to accomplish. Wow.

NOOO! Now all of my accounts are associated to a new account.

Setting up IMAP on my iPhone and Mail.app using Google Apps

November 6th, 2007

I’m sure everyone reading this, especially those of you that use Gmail, is aware that IMAP is now available through both Gmail and most Google Apps accounts*.

My Google Apps account became IMAP-enabled on Friday, November 2nd, 2007. Once I saw this I quickly moved into action to setup IMAP on my iPhone and in Mail.app (Apple’s Mail client on the Mac OS). I followed the instructions in Gmail’s help section to the letter. First I setup my iPhone and everything went swimmingly. Then, I moved all of my email from my Inbox into an archive folder in Mail.app (in case something went awry) and setup IMAP in Mail.app. Once I hit save, Mail.app went out and grabbed all 4,000+ messages from the Gmail server.

The email address that I’m setting up is my personal email account that I’ve only had for a few months, which is why there was only 4,000 messages to sync. To date, I’d been using POP with Gmail and so all of the messages came in marked as ‘unread’. I thought nothing of selecting all of the messages and clicking “Mark all as read”. This led to four days of Mail.app syncing with Gmail’s servers before I was able to receive a single new message. Very frustrating.

I’m not sure what I could have done differently to save myself from this four day hassle. Perhaps logging into my account through my browser and marking all messages as read there first? Either way I am definitely happy it is over and if you find yourself in a similar situation to mine – know that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Derek Punsalan has some really great tips for setting up Gmail’s IMAP on both the iPhone and Mail.app that go beyond what is provided in Google’s help area. I recommend that you make these small changes to your setup, which seem to make things much much nicer when dealing with multiple devices.

* I say “most” because it seems to be that gmail.com users got IMAP quite a bit sooner than Google Apps accounts and that some still haven’t had it enabled for them.