Random Bits of Randomness

I have for a long time avoided using Google apps for my mail because working with multiple mail accounts in a browser is less than satisfactory.  However, last fall I decided that upgrading my mail server for better spam protection was just too expensive so I made the move.  Overall, Google apps mail (essentially gmail on your own domain) is very functional and has great spam protection.

The biggest problem is when you have multiple accounts.  For example, I have to monitor  jsouthwell@arcanatech.com, sales@arcanatech.com and support@arcanatech.com.  In a normal email application, it is easy to add multiple accounts and monitor each as needed.  However it’s not so easy with browser based email as you have to log out and log in to swap between accounts.  I tried just opening new browser windows (or tabs) for each, but gmail doesn’t like that.  You actually will get a dialog pop up saying that you have logged into a new account and will log out the other tab.  Very frustrating.

I’ve downloaded several gmail toolbar applications that claim to support multiple accounts but none solve the problem of having multiple accounts open at the same time.

I recently downloaded Google’s Chrome 2.0 as I heard that it better supported distinct profiles and I suspected that I could create profiles for each email account and use Chrome’s cool app feature to create links to my email accounts from each profile.  Unfortunately the app feature doesn’t seem to remember the profile used to launch the link so that didn’t work.

However, I found that I could manually create shortcuts to web pages that specify the profile I want to use.  This almost completely solves the problem.  For example, shortcut one links to:

C:\Users\jason\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe —user-data-dir=”....\User Data-jsouthwell@arcanatech.com” —app=”http://mail.google.com/a/arcanatech.com”

and shortcut two links to:

C:\Users\jason\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe —user-data-dir=”....\User Data-sales@arcanatech.com” —app=”http://mail.google.com/a/arcanatech.com”

Now when I click on link one, I get a cookie space dedicated to jsouthwell@arcanatech.com and link two gives me a cookie space dedicated to sales@arcanatech.com.  The result, I can have multiple windows open for multiple gmail accounts on the same domain with no conflicts.

All I need now is a good taskbar notification app for multiple gmail accounts that link to the correct shortcut to launch for each account.  Then I’d be very very happy.

(note, this solution likely will work in the currently released version of Chrome but I haven’t tried.  It also may work in other browsers that support user profiles launched from the command line)