Having multiple accounts has been a pain for GMail users for a while. You have to log out of one account and log back in the next. Now, Google has introduced a way for you to link up to three accounts to your Google account, so you can sign in and switch between them at will – or even open a different tab for each account. Wow!
According to the Gmail Blog, everyone should now be able to activate multiple accounts by heading to your Google Accounts page. Now, you can visit google.com/accounts and click the link next to “Multiple sign-in.” After you sign into your first account, you can sign in with up to two additional accounts from the new accounts menu in the upper right hand corner of Gmail, then easily toggle back and forth between them. You can even open multiple Gmail tabs — one for each of your accounts.
However, there are 3 caveats that Google quickly warns about, though:
1) Not all Google services support multiple account sign-in yet. For the services that don’t support it (like Blogger and Picasa Web Albums), you’ll be defaulted to the first account you signed in with during that browser session. So if you click a link from Gmail to Blogger, for example, you’ll be logged into Blogger with the first account you signed in with, even if you clicked the link to Blogger from your second Gmail account.
2) We’re still working on making Gmail and Calendar work offline with multiple sign-in. If you rely on offline access, you probably don’t want to enable this feature quite yet.
3) Multiple account sign-in only works on desktop browsers for now, so if you use Gmail on your phone’s browser you won’t see this option yet.
Since Google Apps customers can already sign in to their accounts at the same time as their personal Google Accounts, we won’t be adding this new feature to Google Apps until the new infrastructure is in place.
This is expected to boost company adoption of Google Apps because Gmail login had been a drawback. This has been a much-requested feature in Google products for some time. Most of us have at least two active Gmail addresses, especially those of us who use Gmail for both our work and personal lives. Previously, the only ways to access two accounts at once conveniently were to use a desktop client for e-mail, calendar events and feed reading (all of which partially defeat the purpose of using web apps in the first place) or to resort to browser extensions like the Google Account Multi-Login Greasemonkey script, which hacks this feature into Gmail.
