Good news for Gmail users out there: if you have been unable to add a new Gmail account to sync your emails, contacts and calendar on your Windows 10 Mobile phone over the last few days, the Mountain View giant has now provided a fix. The Inquirer has spotted that William Dennis, a product manager from Google’s identity team has addressed the issue on the company’s own product forums over the week-end:
Sorry for this problem everyone, this was not intentional and has now been fixed. If you are still having trouble adding your Google account, please let me know.
As several users were still wondering why they were no longer able to sign-in to their Google account during that time (the sign-in web page then said that Microsoft Edge was “not supported anymore”), Dennis added that “this issue was definitely unintentional, we’ll work hard to make sure it doesn’t happen again!” Additionally, if you used the IMAP protocol as a workaround to sync your emails from your Gmail account on your Windows phone, Dennis explains that you should stop doing that now as it’s less secure and it also doesn’t allow you to sync your Google contacts and calendars:
BTW: Nobody should need any workarounds anymore. For better security, if you enabled “Allow less secure apps: ON” in account settings due to this issue, I’d suggest turning it back OFF and adding your account to the phone in the normal way 🙂
If that’s you, here’s how to proceed:
- In your phone settings, go to “Accounts”, then into “Email & app accounts” and then delete your Gmail account that you synced through the IMAP protocol.
- From your Gmail settings on the web, you now need to turn off “Allow less secure apps to access your Gmail account” if you enabled it previously.
- Go back to “Email & app accounts” and your phone and add your Gmail account by selecting “Google”.
We’re glad that Google was quick to provide a fix as this issue could potentially harm the productivity of many Windows 10 Mobile users. It also shows that while Google is still not ready to develop UWP apps, the company still cares about those using its services on Windows 10 Mobile.
