Its like paying to be a second class citizen! :)

Every once in a while I think of paying the Workspace ransom, hoping it would keep Google from potentially locking me out of my account for nebulously defined reasons. Then I come across stories like these how Workspace gives you an interior product (and likely no account protection).

Same here, and the account switcher doesn't work.

Reminds me of when the Google Voice iOS account switcher would "trap" you in an account of an unsupported country, with the only recourse being re-installing the app and taking care to never accidentally switch to that account again (which can easily happen with the "swipe to fast switch" gesture on the account icons).

I had to go back to Google's homepage and switch accounts there

Agree, very frustrating.

You can add /u/1 or /u/2 to the end of the URL to use another Google Account.

Works great for bookmarks. </sarcasm>

For bookmarks use https://bard.google.com/[email protected]

while we're here showing people the account-hopping techniques for Google's painful world of auth'ing: the `?authuser=` trick can also be used with numbers from 0-9, to authenticate (by zero-index) your web browser's 10 slots for logged-in accounts (e.g., `?authuser=2` to authenticate your third account slot).

TIL

Thank you! This allowed me to use Bard without going into Incognito mode!

At least Google has an account switcher. I’m looking at you, AWS. (I’m currently launching a project on Google Cloud, and I’m picking it over AWS primarily because the AWS console’s account management is so terrible [0]. There are only so many hours in the day, and the whole point of paying a 4-40x markup for the cloud is to reduce workload.)

Not that Google’s account switcher has ever been particularly good.

[0] Not just the console. AWS organizations are sort of okay, but you still need to give every account an email address. Seriously, Amazon? I bet you could invent a new subtype of account called, say, “project”, where a project has a name, does not have an email address, does not have a root non-IAM user, and is only accessed via IAM roles. And I bet you could, with more effort, teach the console to accept a URL prefix that encodes the name of an account and a role and gives a console view with that role assumed without globally assuming that role. And then I could administer a VPC according to current best practices, from the console, without cursing at multi-account containers and needing to correctly type the account and role every time I want to do anything.

For organization accounts, we just use `[email protected]` which routes all emails for all accounts to one alias.

Also, yeah, AWS' account situation is bonkers. Even with organizations, if you have an account open in one tab and open another account in another, you get logged out of the first. Bonkers.

This naming scheme works, but it still seems suboptimal. I should never, under any circumstance, receive email intended for the root user of an account that is subordinate to an organization. If someone manages to create a password associated with that user or otherwise authenticate as that user, that is a security failure. Conversely, I should be able to assume the “role” of that account’s root user from the organization’s management account regardless of IAM policy inside that account. And the scare quotes are intentional: no role should need to exist inside the sub-account for this to work — it should not be possible to lock myself out of a sub-account by any manipulation of that sub-account’s IAM configuration.

I use separate Chrome profiles to switch AWS accounts.

Also better to have no browser extensions installed when doing anything sensitive.

firefox containers FTW

You need to open an incognito tab, and log on to the gmail account there, and re-do the process.

+1 I came here to write this comment word for word. The speed of IBM-ization of Google is astounding.

I got the same message with my regular Google account. What is a workspace account and which type of account do I need to use Google Bard?

You need an @gmail.com account.

I have, that's what I was trying to say.

I do not understand why Google makes it so difficult to pay them for a custom email domain.

Does it? I have no problem paying them for mine.

Never had a problem either

You have to get a whole workspace thing and administer your email like a company. And there are many settings to get wrong! And problems like this where some Google products don't work or are limited.

Ah, you're talking about a custom domain to use with GMail specifically. Yes, for that either you use "Email forwarding" if you got your domain from Google Domains, which lets you receive and send emails but the sent emails are not SPF valid, or you use a Workspace. I used to do the "Email forwarding" thing in the beginning but then I moved to Fastmail.

I got G Suite or whatever it’s called now before it was paid and before Google Domains sadly. I discovered unbelievably late that I didn’t have two factor on that account because for some reason the G Suite admin panel was defaulted to disabling it organization wide (aka just me). I don’t know why they don’t just have a $20/mo option in gmail that just does this properly in one click.

Use VPN. It was easy to trick and get on the waitlist.

Ah yes, I want to risk getting banned by Google.

Oh no! They'll delete my free account and I'll be forced to spend 3 minutes making another throw-away.

I got the same one.

Bad experience Google.

What gives.

I wonder if it is for the best - imagine getting locked out of your work account becuase of some flagged request or response in Bard

Back in the day, Google Apps was pitched as a personal/family thing for custom domains. My email address - and those of, over time, dozens of family members - are hosted in this way.