Android Email: old account name, not new account name

December 17, 2016 11:02 AM

In a nutshell, I was changing email accounts on a Nexus 7, and the account name remains unchanged. Is there a fix?

Here is the more or less complete saga, but only the current, unsatisfactory state of affairs is relevant to the issue. I think.

1. The Nexus 7 is several years old. I had it set up with GMail on the email app of course, but I added a couple. One was MyName.Yahoo.com and the other was MyName.Employer.com.

2. I recently deleted the Employer.com account, downloaded Outlook and re-established the Employer.com account in Outlook. No problems.

3. Yahoo has been harassing me to stop using a third party (i.e. Gmail) client. This is because of their big security breech. Today, I decided to do that, so I downloaded the Yahoo client and set up my account, changing the password.

4. I then tried to delete the Yahoo account from the Gmail client. The instructions are to go to Settings/Personal/Accounts and delete it there. When I did, it deleted the Yahoo account that I had just created. I recreated the Yahoo account, and it works fine.

5. I was unable to find a way to delete Yahoo from the Gmail Client. Since it didn't have my new Yahoo password, it started to complain that it couldn't connect because it didn't have the new password.



6. I decided that if I couldn't delete it, maybe I could make the situation better by changing it to a totally different account using my ISP email: MyName @MyCable.com. I changed all the settings, specifically changing the Account Name to MyName @MyCable.com. It sends and receives mail fine, but...

7. The account name on the Gmail screens remains [e-mail].

So, I will be happy if I can either remove the Yahoo/MyCable account from the Gmail Client completely, or if I can change the name from Yahoo to MyCable everywhere. Anyone have any hints? (OS is Android 6.0.1)

posted by SemiSalt to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

I have no helpful suggestions, but wanted to confirm that this seems to be an actual bug, and not a weird problem that you're having--I did something similar, and tried for months to get the account name to change. I eventually bought a new phone, which seems like an extreme solution. I'd imagine that reformatting would work, too, but again, it seems extreme. Unfortunately, I have no better solutions to offer.
posted by mishafletch at 5:04 PM on December 17, 2016

Can you go into Gmail on the device, then touch the hamburger menu, then hit the down arrow next to the Google account for the device, then select Manage accounts? From there touch Personal, then touch the Yahoo account, then touch the 3 dots in the upper right, and then select Remove account.
posted by glonous keming at 5:09 PM on December 17, 2016

Response by poster: glonous, even if you go in via Gmail, you get to the same Manage Accounts page as if you started with Settings. When I erased the apparent Yahoo account that way, I erased the new one, not the old one.

Based on mishafletch's experience and my own, I think it was an unrecoverable error to add the new Yahoo Account before trying to delete the old one. I guess i'll just live with it, however much it irks me that a simple bug like that should persist through multiple updates. Especially as it probably means a new Android tablet would have the same issue (though I hope I'm smart enough not to encounter it again).
posted by SemiSalt at 7:03 AM on December 18, 2016

Response by poster: After looking at all the help sites I could find without success, I found that the instructions for the Moto-X on the Sprint site worked.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:52 PM on December 28, 2016

Response by poster: Oops, I failed to do the link properly.

http://simulator.sprint.wdsserve.com/vdevice-sprint/actions/device/motorola_xt1056_moto_x/remove_an_email_account

On step 6, when you are looking at the three options of calendar, contacts, and mail, you may have to tap on mail before the menu (three vertical dots).
posted by SemiSalt at 5:56 PM on December 29, 2016