Blogs on Gmail and Google Accounts

In this blog, we are going to discuss Google's alternative email and alternative username. This is one of the topics on which we consistently receive queries in both the Gmail and the Google Account Help Community for various reasons, so an article explaining what they are and how they happen (or happened) should be helpful for many users.  Where do we see the details for Google's alternative email and alternative username? We see them on the Email page for Google Accounts. We can visit the page by arriving at the Google My Account Home page and thereafter, clicking on the Personal info link in the left panel and then, click on the arrow icon in the Email box under the Contact info section. Alternatively, we can just click on this link -  https://myaccount.google.com/email  to arrive on the Email page for Google Accounts. If you have a recently registered Google account, you will not see the Alternative username section at all. You will, however, see the Alternative emails sect

I happened to find a thread in the Gmail forum that read, "When I get an email, can that person get an auto reply stating my new email address?".  The easy answer to that is, "Of course!". All it requires are creating a canned response - called Templates in Gmail these days, and a filter.  In this blog, we shall look at the details of those. The first step is to create the Template (the canned response). The details related to Templates are already mentioned in  https://blogs-on-gmail.blogspot.com/2019/05/canned-responses.html , So here, I shall simply go through the process of creating a Template that suits our purpose. We write the response and then follow the process to save it as a Template. Once our response is written, we can focus on creating the filter. To begin, we click on this Show search options icon. We have just one criterion for this filter, to match all emails where our email address is entered as a recipient.  Note: Historically it was specified th

There are many among us who still prefer to access their emails through an email client. They mention obvious advantages such as one user interface for all email accounts, offline access, local storage etc.  So, in this blog, we shall look at the sequence of steps to add a Gmail address to an email client - Mozilla Thunderbird using IMAP. However, before starting the process, we shall check two very important details: under Gmail settings Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab, we need to check if IMAP is set as enabled in the IMAP access section. under the Google Accounts My Account page security tab, we need to check the status for 2-step verification for the account. Note: Having 2-step verification is not a requirement for this process. But, I am a huge advocate of having it enabled on the account for enhanced security. With these two details checked, we can now proceed to open Thunderbird and add this Google account there.  In the Thunderbird home screen, we locate the Email button under the