Blogs on Gmail and Google Accounts

Of late, many users have reported receiving the "We are sorry, but you do not have access to Gmail. Please contact your Organization Administrator for access." message while attempting to add Gmail to their non-Gmail Google accounts which are also not Google Workspace accounts.  Normally, users would need to follow the steps mentioned in the "Adding Gmail" help article:  https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/72198?hl=en , but the current complaint is that, after being signed into their non-Gmail account and clicking on the 9-dot Google apps launcher icon and then, the Gmail icon, they receive the following message. Apparently, something is not working as intended and after looking at the URL, we can spot a redirection to the https://admin.google.com/a/cpanel/... URL.  The cPanel feature and why it is essential to activate for Gmail in Google Workspace domains is explained in this help article:  https://support.google.com/a/answer/54717?hl=en . As seen, the chec

In spite of the growing popularity of social media and messaging apps, Emails still retain their importance. We use it for all official and otherwise important and formal correspondences, all our important reports - medical, financial, professional get delivered to it, and if it is a Gmail address, then it also ties everything to its Google account, where you would typically have all your valuable documents stored and invaluable photos saved. Now imagine losing access to all of those, suddenly, over something you casually overlooked or were previously cavalier about. There are various ways one can lose access to their Google account. Some are more ubiquitous than others, so there is a very strong argument about better understanding what needs to be done to be able to keep your Google account accessible all the time. It is important to remember that this is NOT a blog on account recovery. There are several of them around (my favourite being this one ) and it is pointless to add one mor

The original blog entry on ways to find your way around Google's email service and to perform the basic email tasks can be found here - https://blogs-on-gmail.blogspot.com/2019/02/gmail101.html .  This is a supplemental blog entry because recently, Google decided to expand Chat access to consumer users, thereby causing changes to the Gmail web and mobile apps UI. Here, we shall highlight the changes made in the Gmail standard view web UI and also answer some of the frequently asked questions related to this topic. A bit of history to begin with.  This used to be the Gmail web UI prior to its redesign in 2019: After the redesign in 2019, Gmail used to look like as shown below. Two very prominent sections in the left panel - Gmail labels (#1) on top and Hangouts (#2) below it. Thereafter, sometime in 2020, Meet was introduced in Gmail and the UI was changed again. Here, we find a third section in the left panel, for Meet (#1). Additionally, a new Support icon “?” was added (#2) and