this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
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did they change this because i was pretty sure you can create a google account with your normal email and then add gmail on later.
No, it depends on where you live. In my country, goolag asks for your phone number. You can't use your other email address to create a goolag account.
Its not just google, it's every service now days that requires phone number. Specifically the big ones. For example, I remember gmx and mail.com didn't ask for a phone number, but they do now.
The "confirm that you are a human with a phone number"
Because I have never received a robocall from a bot using a real phone number...
I created by account with my own email, but they forced the addition of a gmail for some service, so my account has two different usernames.
Worse, if I use the Google account login for a third party service it will use the fucking gmail account for notifications. I only learned this after they sold their domains off to square space and I had to try and hunt down my logins again and discovered that they hadn't been moved to my square space account with the same email but had been moved to a new account they created using my Google account.
Are you saying that there's a random gmail account associated with every custom domain google account?
Not quite, more that anyone who had a domain registered with Google may now have a Square Space account connected to their gmail address and Google account.
Maybe it’s regional?
You definitely can do this. Unless this is an extremely recent change or only done outside the US
In France you have been able to create accounts with any address for a long time. Don't know why it would be different in another country.