Opening Multiple Google Gmail Accounts in Multiple Browsers

Multiple browsers for multiple Google accountsI noticed an interesting fact about Google and an interesting difference between Google and Yahoo. If you are a consultant and work with several accounts, or an independent sales ronin working with several companies, you may have more than one yahoo account or several Google accounts.

If that is the case, then you’ve probably noticed this interesting artifact. If not, here is something that you can leverage to help you in your business and your sales organization.

Let’s say that you are an independent sales rep and you have several different email accounts on Yahoo to keep all of your activities separate. You’ve got an account for your ABC Training Company sales functions. Then you’ve got another account for handling your XYZ Manufacturing sales activities. And then you have another account to handle your own small independent affiliate business that’s humming along by itself while you’re off doing other things.

If you’ve got all of your accounts on Yahoo and you’ve got one laptop, then you can only access one account at a time.

Let’s say that you’re working as XYZ Manufacturing sales rep at 11:30 AM and you are working the email in browser number one. You remember that you’re supposed to receive a message from a client looking for training today. They said that they were going to get back to you at 11:45 AM. You look at the clock at the bottom of the screen and see that it is now 11:42 AM.

You pull up browser number two and go to www.yahoo.com. But wait… it says that you’re already logged on as XYZ Manufacturing rep. No problem. You sign on as ABC Training rep and get your email from your client. However, now browser number one has logged you out and you discover that it is now logged in as ABC Training rep as well. You have lost access and insight into your XYZ Manufacturing email.

So if you are using Yahoo, your account is tied to your system, and your system can only have one active account at a time.

Now contrast this to Google.

Same situation, same business accounts only this time your email accounts are on Google, not Yahoo. You have one browser opened accessing your XYZ Manufacturing email and it’s now 11:42. You open up browser number two and go to www.Google.com. This time, you notice up in the upper right hand corner that you are not logged in. Wait a minute! You bring up browser number one and see that XYZ Manufacturing rep is logged in and email is up in all of its glory. But in browser number two, there is no account logged in.

So you log in as the ABC Training rep and go to gmail to get your client's email. Out of curiosity you bring up browser number one and you see that you are still logged in as the XYZ Manufacturing rep.

The account is tied to the browser object. So if you have five different accounts on Google for 5 different gmail accounts, you can open up 5 different browsers and maintain visibility into all of them at the same time.

Very cool! Especially if you have several Gmail accounts.

There is one drawback.

If you use any of Google’s other services, oh like say Google Feedburner, Google Analytics, or Google Blogger, then they can only be accessed in the browser that is owned by the account that they are tied to. So if you are using Google Analytics to monitor your home based business web site, then the only browser that can access that Analytics account will be the one that is also accessing your home based business Gmail account. Browsers accessing other active Gmail accounts won't have visibility into your home based business Analytics account.

And, when logging in, don't select the “Remember me on this computer” option. Otherwise, your browsers will force your Google accounts to behave like your Yahoo accounts and every new browser opened will log in with the remembered account:

Set your browser free by unchecking the remember me on this machine button.

Just a little something to keep in the back of your mind.

Anyway, if you have multiple gmail accounts, this is a way cool feature to manage your sales functions, maintain different blogs and operate small businesses while maintaining an open view of everything that is going on.

And you can do it all from the convenience of one desktop and one machine.

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