this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
260 points (94.8% liked)

You Should Know

31737 readers
5 users here now

YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)

Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.

All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.

Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:

**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **

Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.

Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.

Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.

Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.

Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.

Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.

Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.

Partnered Communities:

You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.

Community Moderation

For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.

Credits

Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Thekingoflorda
_MoveSwiftly
ja2
Rooki
260
YSK: You don't need Gmail to create a Google account (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by hiramfromthechi to c/youshouldknow
28 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Why YSK: A Google account is not the same as a Gmail account, and you don't need to create a new Gmail email account to have a Google account.

I've spoken to many different people who equate a Google account to a Gmail account. This is not the case. Unfortunately, this leads to many new Gmail accounts being created, solely because they think that they need to have a Gmail in order to access other Google services.

Here's the gist:

A Google account gives you access to Google services like Sheets, Docs, Calendar, Drive, Photos, Gmail, YouTube, etc.

A Gmail account is an email service account with Google. When you create a Gmail, you also create a Google account by default.

However, the reverse is not true. If you create a Google account (with a non-Gmail email address), it does not automatically give you a Gmail account.

If you already have an email account with another provider, you can use that as your Google account.

For example: Let's say your email is [email protected]. Rather than creating [email protected], you can opt to create a Google account with [email protected] and avoid creating an account for Gmail.

Unfortunately, Google tries to get you to create a Gmail account during the process of creating a Google account. (see image).

It's important to differentiate this and prevent people from registering new Gmail accounts unnecessarily.

top 28 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 66 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

For example: Let’s say your email is [email protected].

YSK: These domains are reserved for use in examples:

  • example.com
  • example.net
  • example.org

Why YSK: Using these instead of made-up domain names reduces the chance of confusing readers, eliminates the possibility of phishing attacks, and avoids sending unwanted traffic to made-up domains if they happen to belong to someone.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2606#section-3

[–] hiramfromthechi 5 points 1 week ago

Nice to see this as a standard, thanks. Edited to reflect this.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 week ago (3 children)

What's the harm in creating the gmail account with your google account?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)

No real harm, but it's one more account to manage/worry about.

Flipside is that relying on a singular account is also bad, as now it's a single point of failure in regards to security.

[–] halcyoncmdr 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You're making a new account either way. Whether you login with a gmail or other email address makes no difference to it being a Google account. Making a gmail you ALSO get another email, which you can promptly ignore until some possible point in the future where it may be useful.

[–] Redex68 1 points 1 week ago

I mean if you make a gmail account just for your Google account, you'll either have to log into your Gmail account to check emails or miss potential important emails related to your account, which you would get if they were sent to your main email.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

These companies typically use AI analyses of uploaded files to prevent people from doing stuff like upload child porn. Unfortunately, they can't distinguish between "pedo shit" and "picture of naked child with a nasty rash emailed to a doctor".

Several people have lost years of email because they uploaded pictures like those to OneDrive. By separating accounts, you can keep your files and your email separate.

There have also been instances of people attacking others by inviting them to WhatsApp groups (which still isn't disabled by default) and spamming a bunch of illegal shit. If you have WhatsApp set to auto backup, you may just end up sending that illegal shit to Google, who in turn detects it and kicks you out of your account.

For this reason, I think it's a good idea to separate any cloud storage accounts from your email accounts.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yes, but what does change when I register both accounts with a Gmail address?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

In theory you get the benefit of them banning your Drive Google account and leaving your email Google account alone. Google will probably link the two, but I don't think the ban will cross accounts automatically.

[–] hiramfromthechi 2 points 1 week ago

I suppose "harm" can be subjective in this context, and there are already some good replies here.

One more thing to add to the list that I'd consider harmful in creating a Gmail account is all of the privacy issues that come with having a Gmail account.

Out of respect for my recipients and myself, I wouldn't want all of our emails being read.

We can go down the rabbit hole of "Email is inherently insecure anyways," but that's a separate discussion.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago

Damn. I worked for Google for almost 10 years and I had no idea.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago

Well why not use a gmail so they dont get a personal mail account or something

[–] over_clox 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I wouldn't know. My Google account is older than YouTube, and GMail was just getting out of the beta stage. Smartphones didn't exist yet, nor did all these modern fancy apps.

So the signup process was totally different back then. And when they acquired YouTube, that meant I automatically had a YouTube account, but oddly enough I had to use a different username than my Google account, to avoid conflicts as they merged.

I only use Google services on the devices I leave at home, my mobile devices will never see the likes of Google though. They don't have any business tracking all my activity, so as far as their systems know, I haven't left home in over 3 years LOL!

[–] Squizzy 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Except your google devices at home see your local wifi and the same degoogled devices are logged on multiple wifi netowkrs throughout each day so they still track you.

[–] over_clox 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Yeah, I get that. That's why my non-Googled devices are not connected to my home WiFi.

Already covered captain 👍

[–] Squizzy 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Nice, are they linux phones?

[–] over_clox 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yes and no. All Android phones run some variation of Linux actually.

My more private devices are still on their original stock Android 11, I just never signed into Google, and never activated location services.

F-Droid for the win!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yes and no. All Android phones run some variation of Linux actually.

At this point, that's kind of like saying Macs run a variation of BSD. It's technically true, but not practically useful in most cases.

[–] over_clox 1 points 1 week ago

They still ain't got my info though. Hell, their algorithm's best guess still can't figure me out.

I have two completely different isolated internet services, one for home and one for the road. Guess which one ain't tracking me..

[–] catalog3115 1 points 1 week ago

😆😆 good I haven't leaved home for over a month

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

Same with Microsoft. I have a Microsoft account for a Gmail address, but Microsoft doesn't realise that they should disable Outlook, leading to the funny weird situation where you can log in to Outlook.com with a Gmail address and enter a completely useless empty mailbox. I bet Google has the same quirk.

Alright, I guess I could enter IMAP or POP details and use Outlook as some kind of email client by proxy, but that's an even worse idea.

[–] ccunning 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

So is this why I’m able to receive new emails from the Google Group I joined with my non-Gmail account, but not actually access the Google group to see past messages to the group?

[–] hiramfromthechi 2 points 1 week ago

Sounds like it. It happens with other Google services too. Someone could share a GDoc to your non-Gmail email, but if that non-Gmail email isn't a Google account, then you won't be able to access the doc/comments/whatever else (depending on the doc permissions, of course).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Can we use Google email service with a custom domain email? As far as I am aware, it requires some Google service suite.

Also, what happens when you lose access to the custom domain? Do they verify the domain ownership periodically, or do you just own it?"

[–] atocci 3 points 1 week ago

It's totally possible to do without the suite! With my free Gmail account and my domain registered through cloudflare, I have a custom email address for just the cost of the domain. I have the custom email set as an alias in Gmail, and Cloudflare does routing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Google will typically ask you to add a DNS entry, or an HTML tag to the home page. This will usually prove ownership. If you lose access, I think this mechanism should automatically kick you off at some point.

They used to offer free domain services, I think, or at least very cheap subscriptions. I think they've moved away from those since.

[–] jelloeater85 1 points 1 week ago

You can use https://forwardemail.net It works really well. I can send and receive on a custom domain with my Gmail.