Another happy customer today!
A local gentleman came to see me today with a query regarding logging into his Google account on his iPhone. Even though he would follow the prompts and would be able to successfully log in, subsequent attempts to access his Google account required him to log in again, which was becoming understandably frustrating for him.
He was able to replicate the problem for me and I was soon able to work out what was going on.
Google email accounts can be accessed in several different ways. Full stops (dots) before the ‘@’ sign are ignored, so for example
are all considered to be synonymous by Google.
In addition, the use of @gmail.com and @googlemail.com are also considered by Google to be synonymous. Thus
It follows that any variation of dot-separation and gmail.com/googlemail.com are the same as far as Google are concerned. This is true both when logging in, and when sending an email to a Google account.
However, when accessing a Google account from outside of the Google universe, in this case from an iPhone, you need to be consistent. My visitor today had his account set up on his phone in the format . When his phone prompted him to sign in, he was signing in as . This worked, but wasn’t retained as it didn’t match the configured account, and so the iPhone kept prompting him. Once we logged in as , the phone remembered the login and stopped nagging him!
For more information please see https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en-GB and https://support.google.com/mail/thread/183769349/difference-between-googlemail-com-and-gmail-com-accounts?hl=en