At some point in 2007 Google ran into some legal issues which meant that they couldn’t use gmail.com in Europe. because of this when I registered a new Gmail account to use with my Android phone I was assigned an @googlemail.com address rather than an @gmail.com address. I still received messages send to @gmail.com but as far as Google were concerned it was googlemail address.
Last month Google sent out a message to anyone with a googlemail address saying that they could switch their accounts over to gmail.com, which I like many others did. That’s where the problems started. My email works fine, as it always has, however I noticed that for some reason my phone refused to sign into Google Talk, fair enough I never use Google Talk so I just ignored that error message. a while later I noticed that I couldn’t download anything from the Android marketplace. I assumed that there was a network issue as I could quite happily access the market, search it, and queue apps up for download. Only they would never get past the “Starting Download” phase.
It turns out that whatever authentication Google uses seems to have thrown a tizzy because I was no longer @googlemail.com but now @gmail.com. I did a quick hunt and found a support thread which told me what I already suspected. I’ve now switched back to googlemail rebooted my phone and its started downloading a ton of updates so it’s fixed.
Google now have a warning on the page that allows you to switch stating:
Android users: If you use an Android device and change your address, the following apps may not connect properly: Google Talk and Android Market. The current solution for this is to change back to @googlemail.com, or do a full reset of your Android device and use @gmail.com. We are working on resolving this issue as soon as possible.
This would have been useful to know when I switched, but I guess better late than never. If only there was a way to register for an update so I knew when it was safe to switch to Gmail again.
For anyone else who experiences this problem bitter wallet have compiled instructions for how to fix it (I’ve not tested them I haphazardly found the options myself and fixed it but they look about right):
In order to refer Gmail back to googlemail.com
- On a computer, log into your gmail.
- Click Settings (top right)
- Click Accounts and Imports
- At the bottom, next to ‘Change Account Settings’, click on ‘Google Account Settings’.
- On the opened page it will tell you near the top whether you have a gmail or googlemail address.
- Go back to the previous page, next to ’send mail as’ there is a small ’switch to gmail?’ link, click this.
- Then, click the link that says ‘go back to googlemail’, then on the next page click the next button to confirm (I think it’s the big blue button).
- Then click on the ‘Google Account Settings’ link from the earlier step, this should now confirm you are back on a googlemail account.
I hope this is useful to someone.