The information comes from an official support page in Hindi, which also clearly states that the feature will be rolling out gradually to users, so don’t expect to see this option right away, if at all.
Reading through the support page, the way it works is that once every 12 months, Google will allow you to “change” the email address associated with your Google account. In actuality, the process is more like adding a new alias email to your account since your old email address will not be deleted and will remain functional. You still get one email inbox and outbox, but presumably, you will be able to do some filtering based on which email a message was sent to, as well as choose which email to use for outgoing messages. Essentially, Google is giving users a way to associate up to three new email addresses with an existing account and all of its existing data and services. We aren’t quite sure if it will allow users to “merge” an alternative account they might own into an existing one.
That last bit will definitely be interesting to see since many people tend to have more than one Google account registered for various reasons. The most obvious one is two separate email channels. Gmail never condoned such setups officially, but at the same time, the Gmail mail service is one of the few out there to offer server-side email filtering and even conditional forwarding for free. It is a bit buried in legacy settings menus, but it is there. This new potential development can only make a complex email setup even more powerful. Plus, there are some interesting potential implications for things like managed Google accounts on, say, a school Chromebook.
As we mentioned, there are some restrictions and caveats, like the three new email limit, each a year apart, for a theoretical maximum of four addresses. You also can’t apparently delete any of the addresses once added. We aren’t quite sure whether this will work in some fashion on Google Workspace accounts that have their own email domain different than @google.com. There are plenty of questions left to answer for sure.
Source (In Hindi) | Via | Image source | Image source 2
