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I've got into a bit of a mess with my email situation, and am looking for a way to resolve this as painlessly as possible!

I have one Hotmail account, and three Google account. Just to complicate things further, I have various Google services spread across the three Google accounts (Gmail of course, but also Documents, Reader, Chat, Shopping amongst other things) and my Hotmail details were leaked in the recent EA hack, which means despite me being relatively secure (I've changed my password) I am always getting the Captcha popping up when I login due to unsuccessful login attempts from other people.

So now I need to try and fix this. I do like the idea of having two email accounts - one for personal emails, and one that I can happily sign up to sites randomly on, but I find Google's interface of linking Gmail accounts (IE having a tab for your other accounts, and also having limited access) to be far from ideal.

With that in mind, I was wondering:

  1. Is there a way to quickly merge my Google accounts, within reason? So documents, checkout, chat and everything else will just run through a single account.

  2. Is there a web interface (or piece of desktop software) that will let me easily check both of my Gmail accounts, all from one place, whilst still keeping them relatively separate? (IE an option to switch between view both accounts, or just a single one)

  3. My Hotmail account, what can I do about that? I'm not kidding when I say I have probably signed up to hundreds, probably thousands of sites over the past 10 years using this account.

Any suggestions very welcome.

2 Answers 2

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Is there a way to quickly merge my Google accounts

No. I actually emailed Google about this one after migrating my domain email to Google Apps, since I'd had another Google account set up. They don't offer any services for merging Google Accounts.

let me easily check both of my Gmail accounts, all from one place, whilst still keeping them relatively separate

Is Google's own Multiple Sign-In enough?

My Hotmail account, what can I do about that?

Sadly, not much. Start the painful process of switching those accounts on various sites over to one of your new accounts. Crap like this is the #1 reason I bought my own domain: So my email address would never have to change again.

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  • This is fantastic, thank you! I'm going to use the multiple sign in and bring everything from my hotmail account across too, and change the details on every site I've registered on (d'oh). Also your post just inspired me to go out and buy a domain, but /none/ were available (all registered by the same person too) so I've got an @me.com account which is perfect - will use that for any thing where giving out my gmail details would be shameful :) Thanks again!
    – Nick
    Oct 19, 2011 at 14:09
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afrazier is right about the inability to merge accounts, and everything else. But if you really want to take the time to clean up your accounts, there are a few things you can do.

Mail: use an IMAP client, add all your accounts to that client, then move mail from the folders of accounts you want to retire into the account you want to become the primary account.

If you need to keep your other accounts running, but don't want to check them, you can just set up a filter to forward all mail into your primary account.

Docs: You should be able to download all docs in a collection. There are some limitations, so it depends how much you have. But once you download, you can re-upload into a primary account.

Checkout: you'll have to set up in a primary account.

Chat: you can move your archived chats, but you'll have to send invites through a primary account to have people on your chat list.

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