This is so useful. a Gmail account is so much more than just an email account at this point. my first gmail account was made when anonymity and cool email was more of trend than your actual name - so i based upon my favorite book in 2006. 20 years later the account is tied to my oft used primary google voice number so lingers even with obscure and hard to spell email.

i could gave moved my google voice number, but it seems like a convoluted process and have had my number since about Grand Central acquisition.

That would have been nice to have during transition. Creating a new account and updating 3rd parties was a huge pain and never got close to 100% completion.

Could this be a sign that Google is starting to think again?

For an organisation that often does deeply intelligent things, they spend such a lot of time treating their users unnecessarily poorly because obvious implications seem not to occur to them.

Boss move that I learned under great difficulty: a new temporary gmail alias for every jobsearch.

I wish they'd let me recover my original -- I lost my TOTP generator, and the codes I'd written down in a paper notebook were rejected. I even hunted down the electronic copy in case there was a transcription error -- seemed like some failure in their systems was causing me to lose access despite having followed proper procedures.

Lost a decade and a half of correspondence dating back to my teenage years. I had imported my phone number I'd had since I was 16 into voice, and it doubled as my Signal number. I even had a Gsuite subscription so I could use their (admittedly decently) UI to power my firstname @ lastname dot com email address.

I will never use their services again, I was really digusted by this failure.

Seems useful. But what I really want is a way to merge google accounts, over the course of history I created 3 of them and would really prefer just a single one

an here I am still grinding on a mid-90s iname.com handle

I never really had this issue because I used Google Suite with a domain. (That’s what it was called back then.)

So I can have email aliases under that domain, and even choose the alias for outgoing email.

However! This creates an extra security hole. Once I was SIM-swapped (when the attacker calls up a phone company and convinces them to redirect sms to their SIM). I had used it as a second factor at GoDaddy and had to act fast. GoDaddy had already allowed the attacker to authenticate with the sms (dumb!) and port the domain name. I realized what was happening only because the attacker sent “test” emails to my email at the domain. Had they not done that, I might have been none the wiser. I called GoDaddy and got them to cancel it, thankfully. Otherwise they’d have reset passwords armed with email AND phone number.

Since then I use the non-SMS SECOND FACTOR on most services, as NIST had been recommending for a decade now.

I personally recommend using a username+alias@gmail.com which gmail and others support, with a different but easy-to-remember alias per site, so social attackers can’t even correctly say your email to the dude on the phone.

Michael Terpin, a guy I know, got $27 million dollars in crypto stolen a decade ago by a SIM Swapper and sued AT&T for it. Not sure if he won… he moved to Puerto Rico to avoid taxes and brought Brock Pierce and other crypto bros with him LOL.

It's incredible that in 2025, Google has sprung for "basic competency" after operating a bad email service for 24 years.

In my case, many years ago I changed my last name. (Turns out a lot of women also do this when they do things like... get married. But also for a progressive company everyone's purchases being permanently locked to their deadname seems... bad.) But all of my Android apps, my entire digital life at the time, was permanently locked to my old name. I had another account I created as a mail forwarder but if people sent an invite to it for a Google thing it wouldn't connect to my real account, and obviously there was an added security risk of someone stealing my forwarding account.

I remember talking to Yonatan Zunger about this problem during the Google+ era and it seemed to be renaming an account wasn't something the company was capable of.

Fun fact, if someone knows your email address and clicks “forgot my password” it sends a push notification to the Gmail and YouTube apps asking to confirm or deny the sign in request. They can click that hundreds or thousands of times per day. I know because it happened to me, so I moved all of my accounts off of the email and deleted my YouTube account. :) peace out Google. Thanks for tolerating a completely insane UI, and not allowing me to turn this setting off. I can’t imagine what it’s like for the elderly who have to navigate this completely enshitified landscape.