Switching Google accounts

Just to make my life more complex (hopefully simpler in future) I have decided all my email accounts will consist of three Google accounts, classified as low, medium and high priority. This involves two completely new gmail accounts and one existing one. At the moment I am working on switching over my default email account to one of the new ones (the low priority one) that is the catch-all account for all sorts of web site signups. It is quite a big process switching over Google accounts. The fact this blog is going up under one of my new accounts is part of the completion which has involved changing all the blogs over to two of the new accounts (I always have two author accounts on each blog). 

Some of the big steps undertaken have been transferring and deleting email, and downloading all the Google photos. Google does provide an email and contacts transfer functionality in Gmail that I used to transfer multiple accounts with, including my soon-to-disappear Microsoft accounts. As content has been moved, old content has been removed. The next step was to download 16 GB worth of photos from Google Photos. The reason there was so much stuff in there was that it included all my old Picasa photo albums, long since forgotten about, which evidently were migrated to Google Photos some time back. I currently use Flickr to host these photos and have not done anything with the Picasa stuff for a long long time. Consequently there are many duplicates of Flickr albums and these will not be going back up on the Google Photos of my new account, only the photos taken on the phone are planned for at this stage.

I had to use Takeout to get the photos (there seems to be nearly 100,000 of them) and use a download manager to pull down the nine zip files totalling over 16 GB. Apart from Picasa I also did briefly trial the Google photo uploader to backup my photos from my PC, this was abandoned when I realised it was just a backup tool for backing up photos from a PC, not a sync tool for public albums like Picasa was. I will have to find the phone photos and download them back onto the phone because resetting it (see below) has wiped them out. The biggest potential problem from downloading these photos is whether they will have an impact on old blogs, because Google stores blog illustrations on Google Photos, so if I delete my old account it does have the potential to remove the photos including possibly the ones that were used in blogs.

Next steps including migrating calendars and the Chrome profile and this will take some investigating and testing. I have also factory reset my phone to force it to use one of my new accounts so I have had to reinstall all the apps on it. There is still a lot of account migration work to do and it will be some time before I actually delete anything. But I did delete a very old Microsoft account going back about five years and it may well be the case there are still some very old Google accounts forwarding occasional emails that will come to light as this project progresses.

How to change the account order in Thunderbird

Thunderbird doesn't provide a user interface for changing the order of accounts in the left hand pane, but Config Editor can be used to change it.

See the guide here

In my case I have 11 accounts listed including the two special ones, so basically 9 email accounts. I expect to tidy all that up and have only three or four listed by the end of this year. Getting it to put the most important ones at the top has been good.

Mozilla Thunderbird

So I am trialling out Tbird again. For some reason I disliked it for quite a long time even though I used it a lot, years ago. I suspect the interface was kind of clunky, but of course there are all these styles available now. Really easy to set up with Google and Hotmail accounts, and with the calendar extension which is integrated, you just need a Gdata provider extension to connect to Google calendars.

Yesterday I was wrong when I wrote that you had to pay for the Google calendar extension, the one you need to pay for is for the extension to connect MS Exchange accounts. I can get by using Windows 10 Mail for just that one Ex2003 account that I use regularly, since it looks like Tbird will do everything else. If it does the Google calendars well then it can replace EmClient that I currently use for my timesheet calendars. It is not quite as tidy or featured as the EmClient calendars but the functionality appears to be there.

It will be interesting to see if Tbird also handles some of the other Google stuff, or Live calendars, although I can get by without the Live calendars since this is mainly for work computers with Windows 10 that I will be using Thunderbird with to start.

Well since writing the above this morning I have quickly moved to put Tbird on every computer I own or use. The Google calendar functionality is great, it works just as well as emClient although the information is not quite displayed in the same way. There is another extension that synchronises contacts which I am also trialling. Basically, Tbird has superior performance over Outlook for IMAP accounts, although in fact just about everything does, including Outlook Express/Windows Mail. It is the fact it works well across Outlook.com accounts and Gmail as well that makes it highly suitable to my requirements. What it doesn't have is the ability to sync Outlook.com calendars readily and possibly their contacts, but that really isn't much of an issue for me at the present time.