Sign-in error for name@gmail.com on Android device [SOLVED!]

All of a sudden logging in to my Google Play account was giving an error and I seemed to be locked out!  Bad situation to be in – I couldn’t upgrade any of my apps – and I needed to do an upgrade because WhatsApp had expired – with error “This version of WhatsApp is too old – you need to upgrade”… OK, but I first needed to solve the error “Sign-in error for name@gmail.com”.

I Googled a bit, then a lot more but nothing worked - then I decided to try something out – I changed the language of my account – I noticed that it wasn’t set to anything.  I logged in to my Google account, then clicked “Account” and saw the “Default languages”: 


I changed it from “Select a language…” to English (United States):
 
Then I tried to login on my Android phone and to my absolute amazement I was logged in :)  No error, just logged in.
I could then switch to the WhatsApp upgrade warning message and update to the latest version – problem solved!
This is one of those out of the blue, accidental fixes that somehow worked… I was amazed and I hope this helps someone out there – please let me know by adding a comment.

Free SMS to MTN and 8ta in GMail: just enter a phone number and click Enter

Free SMS in Gmail - Send free SMSs directly from Gmail - just enter a phone number and click Enter.  SMS replies come right to your Gmail inbox.

See which mobile operators are supported.

Learn more




http://support.google.com/chat//bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164876&rd=1 

Finding emails with large attachments from your GMail account, then deleting them

If you haven’t noticed by now, one of GMail web client’s missing features is the ability to show the size of an attachment in the email list.  Sure, you can see which emails have an attachment but if you want to search for the ones with large attachments and then delete those you will need to download all the emails to your local email client then delete them.  This is a waste of bandwidth so I have tried to find a solution.


I started with the free program ImapSize which can be found here [1.8MB]: http://www.broobles.com/imapsize/download.php
I wanted to use the program to identify all large emails and keep the email but remove the attachments (which I already had on my local PC’s HDD).

Here are the instructions of how to delete the attachments: http://www.broobles.com/imapsize/imap-delete-attachments.php
BUT, when I followed the instructions I could see that a new email was created without the attachments – BUT the original email was not deleted as I thought the program would do.  I see other people in the forums also had similar problems. 

So, I proceeded to use ImapSize to remove all large attachments and use a workaround using my email client (see below) to delete the emails with the large attachments.

I noted that ImapSize hasn’t been updated for a looong while: Version 0.3.7 released (February 19th, 2009), and I also see that the author (Ivan ivecanski) hasn’t got any time to update it and has started making it OpenSource – but the files are still not available :(

Due to the above problems I resorted to using my Outlook email client (as a workaround):
I configured it to use IMAP although on second thoughts pop3 would have been fine.
The main “trick” being that you need to configure the email client to only download headers – and not the attachments nor the body of the emails.
First, setup GMail to allow downloading POP or IMAP: http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=12103
Here’s the instructions on how to set up your email client to fetch the emails:
POP3: (preferred): http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=12103
IMAP: http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=75726&ctx=mail

The above steps will tell Outlook where your GMail emails are and what the passwords and ports are.

Outlook will then start downloading all your emails and attachments… but, hold on – we do NOT want to download any emails – we JUST want to download the list of emails (headers).
So, before telling your email client to go fetch the emails – we need to configure the client to only download the headers:
* Select Tools | Send/Receive | Send/Receive Settings | Define Send/Receive Groups... from the menu.
* Highlight the desired group.
* Click Edit....
* Go to the desired account in the Accounts list.
* Under “Folder options”, select ‘Download headers only’.

* Click OK.
Now, when you click Send/Receive, Outlook will only download the headers information for messages exceeding your threshold size. But getting the full emails is easy, as is deleting messages right at the server without downloading them in full ever.

Once you have all the headers then you can use Outlook’s search functionality to find the emails that are larger than nMB:



Or type the following in the search bar: messagesize:>2MB received:<Oct 2011

This will search through the current folder’s headers and list only the emails that are larger that 2MB and received earlier than Oct 2011.

Select the emails (Ctrl-A) and delete them.

Outlook will then tell GMail to send those messages into the ‘Trash’ folder.

Go to GMail’s web client and “delete them forever” from the Trash folder – check the “%full” reading on the bottom of the mail list.



There you have it – all large emails identified and deleted without actually downloading them to your local computer.

If you have any better methods, then please share them in the comments below.

GoogleDocs for sharing documents

Google Docs is a great way to share your documents and even edit them online at the same time.  Use it to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations online.  Another advantage is that your documents are available online and whenever you need them just hop onto the Internet from any PC and connect to your Google account.

If someone at work shares a document with you using your work email address (fred@work_address.com), there’s no need to create another account to access those shared documents – just login to your Google account (fred@gmail.com): https://www.google.com/accounts/b/0/EditUserInfo?hl=en&service=mail
then in the “Add an alternate email address to your account” section
add your work or alternate email address fred@work_address.com email address.
Then “save”… easy as that!

I struggled a bit to figure out how to share a folder in GoogleDocs… but this article solved the problem – turns out you need to share a collection, then each document that you add to the folder will automatically be shared to a group of people.

Getting GMail from multiple computers: “Recent” mode

I often set up peoples’ computers to fetch their GoogleMail from multiple computers (eg: home and work).  They don’t want their home PC to remove the email from the server so that their work PC doesn’t see the emails any more.  I found this post describing what to do: Using POP on multiple clients or mobile devices

Gmail's 'recent mode' makes sure that all messages are made available to each client, rather than only to the first client to access new mail.

Recent mode fetches the last 30 days of mail, regardless of whether it's been sent to another POP client already.

Setting up 'recent mode':
In your POP client settings (ie: in your email program on your PC), replace 'username@gmail.com' in the 'Username' or 'Email' field with 'recent:username@gmail.com'  (leave out the 's)

Give out a different GMail email address to each potential spammer (web form) without creating a new (dummy) email address each time

When you give a company or web page or "friend" your email address you never really know if it's going to be "given" (OK, sold) to a spam company who thinks that you'll be interested in their latest and greatest product or service.
Well, here's a simple way of finding out who sold your email address to that spammer.... and when they do send you spam, it's easy to set your email program to filter those pesky emails out of your InBox.

Each time you give your email address away (read as: "each time you fill in your email address into a form") add a suffix to your username in your email address that will identify who the email is coming from. So, that's RealEmail+Suffix@gmail.com

For example, if your real email address is FredFlintstone@gmail.com
When filling in a form on site SiteXYZ, then fill in your email address as FredFlintstone+SiteXYZ@gmail.com
So, if you get from that address, you will know that SiteXYZ betrayed your trust and gave your email address to those spammers.

Now, to make that spam go away.... Just create a filter, and make everything that is sent to FredFlintstone+SiteXYZ@gmail.com go to the trash.
This way all the spam will be deleted automatically.

To create a filter see: GMail help on using filters