All over the world googlemail.com is known as gmail.com, in the UK it is called googlemail.com due to a copyright dispute. However, Google sorted out the legal stuff and this week offered all UK users the opportunity to move over to a gmail address. They claimed the switch over would be seamless but it would seem that they’ve overlooked Android handsets.

When downloading from the marketplace, in the background, ‘Talk’ signs in on your Google email address and that is what authenticates the handset to commence downloads from the marketplace. It was still signing into a googlemail.com address, but this no longer existed, and there were error messages stating that Google Talk would not authenticate.

What doesn’t help is that there is no option on the handset to change the settings for the Talk application; you are stuck with the settings you already entered when you set up the phone for the first time.

Your options after the break.

So either you A) remove your googlemail.com account from your phone then add the new gmail address. The problem here is that removing your googlemail.com account from your phone requires a full phone reset, this involves losing EVERYTHING on your phone and starting again from scratch. Not good.

or B) go into your google email account settings (via a computer, not your handset) and switch back to your old googlemail.com address.

In order to refer Gmail back to googlemail.com

• On a computer, log into your gmail.
• Click Settings (top right)
• Click Accounts and Imports
• At the bottom, next to ‘Change Account Settings’, click on ‘Google
  Account Settings’.
• On the opened page it will tell you near the top whether you have a
  gmail or googlemail address.
• Go back to the previous page, next to ’send mail as’ there is a small
  ’switch to gmail?’ link, click this.
• Then, click the link that says ‘go back to googlemail’, then on the next
  page click the next button to confirm (I think it’s the big blue
  button).
• Then click on the ‘Google Account Settings’ link from the earlier step,
  this should now confirm you are back on a googlemail account.”

So in summary, anyone thinking of going Gmail who owns an Android phone should think twice. Thanks Munkeycop!

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