#Unable to logout of gmail windows#

On the next screen (the plain jane Google home screen), click the Sign in link in the top right corner.

If you are signed in, sign out (top right corner).

ItвЂ™s very easyвЂ¦BUTвЂ¦read the warning afterwards as to why itвЂ™s a red herring. The solution is: register a new Google account under the email address that your friend used to share the Google doc with you. There is a simple solution for which I thank George Fletcher of AOL, who first explained it to me and others on the OpenID mailing list who were having this problem a few years ago.

When you click on the link, you are prompted to log into your Google account, but once you do, you canвЂ™t get access to the doc because the email address that the friend used is not the same email address you used to originally create your Google account.ДЄrrggh! (ThatвЂ™s an exact quote from an email I just received from a friend for whom IвЂ™m solving this problem by writing this blog post!) The Simple Solution That Will Get You In Trouble.

You receive an email containing a link to this Google doc.

The easy fixes are also the ones you may live to regret. (And, of course, for GoogleвЂ™s own search engine to find - the Internet brings new heights to irony.)

So this time around IвЂ™m being proactive about it and publishing the solution right here so it will be easy for anyone to reference. And throughout the process I was consistently stunned to find so little information available about it, either from Google or anywhere else. Over the holidays I finally bore down, worked the problem all the way through, and solved it. And the irony? The problem is with none other than Google accounts-the very accounts that we need from this search giant to access many of the services it offers. Now 20 years later, even though weвЂ™ve got the Internet and Google and all, IвЂ™ve just been through the same experience. So thatвЂ™s why there was so little information about it. He published it in his column, and it turned out that thousands of people had the same problem but nobody understood quite what was happening. After finally solving it, I shared my solution with my friend Seattle Times tech columnist Paul Andrews.

#Unable to logout of gmail windows#

Once before, back in 1991, I ran into such a problem with Windows 3.0.

Then, after you finally solve it, you are left scratching your head saying, вЂњI donвЂ™t get itВ-there must be millions of people with this problem-why is there so little information about it?вЂќ Every so often you experience a technical problem you canвЂ™t find any information about and which takes you forever to solve.