How to Get a Google Voice Number for Your Own Email Address

If you want to use some Google services (like Google Voice), and have them associated with your own email address, it’s not all that difficult.

First, if you already have a Google account (like a GMail address), you will want to log out of by clicking on your name or icon up in the upper right corner of any Google app, and then click the “Sign Out” button:

How to delete your Google account

If you’re like me, you eventually end up with too many identities. I haven’t figured out how to associate different email addresses with a single account, so I have to maintain several different Google identities.

For example a client invites me to join his Google group using his company email, so I have to set up a new account to access and manage that group. At some point I try to consolidate these to use my GMail identity, but that isn’t always possible (the client may for instance have decided to restrict their group to only allow access by people using their corporate domain addresses for instance).

Eventually though, I do end up with accounts that I’m no longer using (and sometimes I just would like a fresh start). Google actually has a link in their help about deleting an account, but it took me a bit to find it, so I thought I’d post a step by step guide.First you must be logged in, so go to one of the Google pages like http://groups.google.com and look for the link at the top right corner of the page that shows you who you are logged in as:

If you see the “Sign in” link instead, just click that and log in as the user you want to delete:

Once you are sure you are logged in with the right account, click the “Account” link and you will be taken to the management page for your account:

Click on the link next to “My Products” that says “Edit” and you’ll go to the accounts page, where you can choose to remove your web history OR account:

Click the link that says “Close account and delete all services associated with it”, and you’ll get the delete account screen, which has a number of options and validate with your password. Unless you want to keep a membership in a group, check all of the boxes here, then hit the button that says “Delete Google account“:

Once you have done this, you’ll get a screen that tells you that the account has been deleted:

That’s all there is to it – you can recreate the account by following the steps from my prior post Getting a Google Login for Your Existing Email Account

Getting a Google login for your existing email address

Step 1 – Simulating an email alias using a Google Group

The last couple of days, I’ve been involved in setting up a new non-profit entity and email addresses for the people involved. I used my hosting service to create a new domain, and set up email addresses that forward to their existing email addresses.

What I realized was that I didn’t have an easy way to set up a email aliases, and I needed a way to forward email to the entire group.

Naturally I thought of Google Groups, which lets you set up a sort of discussion board and file sharing area. My team has been using groups for other purposes, and one of the things we learned was that if you keep the group private, it can become confusing as people add their email aliases to the member list so that they can post from their various accounts.

So for this new group, I decided to set it up to only use the email addresses from the new entity, and allow posting to the group by any email address. By doing this, anybody can send an email to groupname@googlegroups.com and it will get sent to the group, effectively creating an alias.

This also keeps the group relatively clean, since the only addresses that show up in the members list are the ones that are connected to the new domain. On other groups I’ve managed, I end up with people with lots of different entries because they have multiple email addresses which can be confusing.

Without signing in, the group can now send email to “all” with a single email address. Of course that doesn’t take advantage of the file sharing and other group features, so what follows are instructions on how to create a login for a new email address which will allow logging into the group.

Step 2 – Creating a new Google login for your email address

First, if you already have a Google login, you want to make sure you are logged out. Go to a Google page like If you are logged in, you will see your login information at the top right corner of the page.

If you are not logged in, or after you click on the “Sign out” link, you will see just the “Help” and “Sign in” links like this:

Now you are ready to create the account. Start by clicking the “Sign in” link, which will take you to a sign-in form that looks like this:

Since we are creating a new account, we click on the “Create an account now”. Note that if you have an existing account, this won’t do anything to that account, you are simply creating a new account separate from the original. You will now see the account creation form:

The form is self explanatory, all you have to do is fill in the fields, type the distorted word on the page, and agree to the terms of service, then submit.

Next you’ll see the account creation verification screen, which will tell you that the account was created and must be verified. You need to check your email for the message, which has a link that validates the email goes to you.

Once you validate, you should once again be able to log in, and see your new login name in the upper right corner of the page:

So for the people in my group, once they create a new Google account with the correct email, they will have access to the Google group that I created, and be able to share files, etc. By setting up the group to allow anybody to post, they can post from their other email addresses, and receive the email on their new address.

You can also delete the account (or any other) should you decide you no longer want or need it, but that is for another day.