Google apps gone screwy perhaps

September 26, 2014 10:34 AM

I have several google apps accounts with email inboxes for each. On my Firefox toolbar I have bookmarks for each of those email accounts in the usual format https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com with my different domains substituted for yourdomain.com of course. Up until yesterday each one of those bookmarks dutifully opened the inbox of the right domain's email account...

...Now they all redirect to the first email account I log in to and change the url to https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox

This is a bit crap. I've logged out of all the accounts. Deleted all of my cookies (not just the google ones) and still this silliness persists. Help?

posted by merocet to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

I'm not sure how persistent this is if you're signing in with different accounts first (I always sign in with the same account first), but I've always bookmarked different accounts with mail.google.com/mail/u/0/ and mail.google.com/mail/u/1/, etc -- does that work in your case?
posted by brainmouse at 10:39 AM on September 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Yes using the mail.google.com/mail/u/0/ and mail.google.com/mail/u/1/ works but as you say requires logging into the accounts in the same order every time which is not great.

Previously the link to https://mail.google.com/a/yukagraphic.com/ would open the email for yukagraphic.com. Now google seems to be ignoring the domain in the URL and defaulting all requests to mail.google.com/mail/u/0/ which opens whichever happened to be the first email account I logged into.
posted by merocet at 10:47 AM on September 26, 2014

I am not exactly clear on what you are saying, but maybe this will help. I use Chrome. I log into one actual gmail account and two or three apps accounts daily. As I manage the app accounts, I set it up so that mail.mydomain.com would go to its own login page. I did that for all of my app accounts (15?). Some time a few months ago, I am redirected to the google login page regardless of which account I want to log into. I simply put [e-mail] into the login field and the correct password into the password field and I am logged in to the correct account. I check off keep me logged in. The next time I open the browser, assuming I checked to stay logged in, and I click on my bookmark for whatever domain I want, it does go to the correct email.

I am not sure if any of that makes sense other than what I think happened to me (and you) is that you no longer have your custom login page. You have to use the gmail login with the user being the full user name @ domain name dot com.
posted by 724A at 10:54 AM on September 26, 2014

As 724A says, I would update your MX records to redirect to "mail.each-domain.com".
posted by humboldt32 at 11:08 AM on September 26, 2014

it's not just you - I've noticed the same thing start happening in the past few days too (my personal email address is gmail, and my work address is Google Apps email). My workaround for now is to, in one of the tabs/windows, use the profile menu (the icon in the very tippy-top right corner of the browser window) to switch from e.g. home to work. I'm then automatically signed in to my second email account.
posted by xbonesgt at 11:13 AM on September 26, 2014

I use xbonesgt trick which I find very handy for keeping work and personal separate. You can have multiple "chromes" with their own bookmarks, etc. Under Settings->users->Add new user for each one. That then gives you an icon at very top left that you can use to open different profiles.
posted by idb at 11:40 AM on September 26, 2014

This is the sanctioned way to deal with switching between multiple GMail accounts.

The problem you describe just…happens sometimes. It generally resolves itself after a while, but it's kind of a "sit and wait" situation. Domain/MX mappings make no difference, usually. As far as I've ever been able to tell, it happens because of Google doing stuff on their end.

I also have multiple accounts that I sometimes need to access simultaneously in tabs(because one's open all the time for chat) and have run into this a bunch of times over the years. Sometimes I've been able to—speculatively, of course—correlate it with them making changes to the login/auth process, other times it's just cuz, presumably something they felt no need to comment on publicly. For a long time I used a Firefox extension for multiple accounts like this one but the random breakage due to Google fiddling got too irritating. (Sometimes it broke because of Mozilla's fiddling with Firefox, but that's its own issue.)
posted by Su at 4:05 AM on September 28, 2014

For whatever it's worth, opening multiple GMail accounts in tabs is working again now. (For me.)
posted by Su at 10:58 AM on October 6, 2014