Problems activating domain aliases on Google Apps

So as most of you know, I have a domain problem, it’s a Godaddy caused addiction really. I don’t consider it a problem, but some of you might.

Anyways, that problem, led me to another problem. I was trying to add a Domain Alias to my Google Apps account, which I use for the email system on the primary websites that I manage. The problem I ran into though was I had a domain name that google was telling me I needed to Activate.

In order to activate the domain alias, I needed to verify the domain. The problem was, I verified the domain, multiple times, using multiple methods, and no matter what I did I still couldn’t activate the domain name. I even went so far as to add another domain alias to my account to see if I could get that one working. Same problem, I could verify it, and it showed up in the history as verified, but if I tried to activate it wouldn’t do anything.

After searching around on the internet for an hour or so I finally stumbled across a forum post that helped point me in the right direction. Basically, the problem was due to google’s multiple account login. I was signed in to both my Gmail account, and my Christoc.com email account, and for some reason that hosed things.

I had to go in and sign out of both accounts. Then login again with my Christoc.com account, click on Manage Domain, then I was able to go through the verification process. Voila, everything is working again!

Initially I did searches for all sorts of things. I assumed I was running into a domain alias limitation on Google Apps, meaning you could only have so many domain aliases attached to an account. That wasn’t the case, though I am sure there has to be a limit in there somewhere. I’m using the free Google Apps accounts, not the business account at this point.