Resolving Conflicts after Google Apps Account Migration

Recently, we have migrated the Google Apps accounts to a new infrastructure that includes all Personal Google accounts. This has introduced a conflict for API users who have the same email address for both types of accounts. As a result, you will not be able to generate a ClientLogin token and will be presented
with an error message such as “Either this object does not exist, or this user does not have permission to access it”, “Invalid client email specified” or an AuthenticationError.CLIENT_EMAIL_INVALID in the SOAP response. You can also verify whether your account is in conflict by making a request directly to the Client Login API.

Request:
https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin?accountType=GOOGLE&Email=my_email_address&Passwd=my_password

Response:
Error=Unknown
Url=https://www.google.com/accounts/ErrorMsg?Email=my_email_address&service=gam&id=unknown

Before the migration, it was possible to have a Google Apps account with your domain (jane@altostrat.com) and a Personal Google account for AdWords, Picasa, Reader, etc. with the same email address. With the new infrastructure, both types of accounts are in one unified system so when you try to generate a ClientLogin token with jane@altostrat.com, we do not know which account you are trying to use. More details about conflicting accounts can be found at the Google Accounts Help Article.


To differentiate between your conflicting accounts, we have created a temporary account (jane%altostrat.com@gtempaccount.com) for you to temporarily hold your data. You can log intohttp://www.google.com/accounts with your gtempaccount and use the wizard to resolve your conflicts. A full walkthrough on the data migration wizard can be found at the Data Migration Getting Started Guide.

Please note that this issue will only affect tools built using clientEmail as a header to identify accounts. If you use clientCustomerId, the tool will not be affected. We recommend using clientCustomerId instead of clientEmail as a best practice.

As always, please post any questions to the forum.

Kevin Winter, AdWords API Team