How to Make Google Apps Behave

Gmail and Google Business Apps are awesome, but they are terrible at playing well together if you have more than one account. Here’s how I make them get in line:

I have two companies which run on Google Apps as well as a personal Gmail account. In addition I have an extra email for each company that I use a slush email for signing up for newsletters etc. All told I have seven potential Gmail logins.

Emails

Step 1: Sort out which of your accounts is going to be your “main” profile. This will be the one that you are generally logged into for services like Google Analytics or Adwords, Google Plus, etc. This is also the one that in the long run will be the repository of all of your emails.

Step 2: Once you have sorted this out, login to the email for that account and click on Settings. Then Click on Accounts and add all of your other emails under Send Mail As. Make sure the “Reply to the same address…” blank IS checked. You will receive emails to the other accounts verifying that this is what you want to do, so click on those as you get them.

Step 3: Login to Each of your other email accounts, click on Settings and Forwarding/POP IMAP. Add your Main email from above as a forwarding address and make sure “Archive XYZ Mails Copy” is selected.

Calendars

Step 1: Login to each of your secondary calendar accounts and click on Settings, Calendars, Sharing. Share your main Calendar with your Main account from above, preferably with admin level access to change appointments etc. Each of these calendars should now show up in your main account.

Other Services

Most of the other services should fall in line however if you have an Analytics or Adwords profile under something different than your Main account you will have to login to that profile and give your Main account access. In the long run the goal is to get all services (including Chrome) logged into the Main account with shared access to all the others.

This should pretty much sort you out. Now for any service such as Google Adwords, Analytics, Plus, Hangouts etc just sign in with your Main account. All emails will come to your Main account (but will also stay archived in the All Mail section of the account it was actually sent to) and if you reply to an email from the Main account it will look to the recipient that it was sent from the secondary account to which the email was originally sent. If you need to search for an old email you only need to search in the Main account. All your events will pop up on the Main calendar even if the invite was sent to a secondary account. Hope this is helpful.

Note: If you have a bunch of existing emails that you want to get into your main account, go into settings on your main account and under POP settings add the account you want the email to come from. Make sure you check the download all (old) mail and that POP is enabled in the secondary account, and let it do its thing for a bit. Once all the email is downloaded you can delete the POP connection as it would be redundant on the forwarding solution above.