Google Toolbar for Firefox: make the GMail button work with Google Apps
Google Apps for Your Domain (GAFYD) is a handy suite for those of you who have your own domain. However, your GAFYD account doesn’t necessarily correspond to the standard Google account, and this can cause confusion when trying to use some of the standard Google tools. One example of this is the GMail button on the Google Toolbar.
If you have a standard GMail account, for instance example@gmail.com, logging in to Google using that would grant you access to any services linked to that account. For those of us who use GAFYD though, our usernames are something like example@example-domain.com. Now we are able to use the tools like Google Reader and many others, but since a GMail account has the corresponding “gmail.com” domain that throws a kink in the hose. That means that when you sign in to GAFYD with yourname@yourdomain.com, you can’t sign up for GMail and the GMail button for the toolbar won’t [by default] function properly. We can fix that.
Google gives us a back door to use to customize the buttons on the toolbar. I’m assuming that you already have the GMail button on the toolbar, already have a GAFYD account, and are signed in to that GAFYD account. Google has step by step instructions on how to complete any of those if you have not already.
Open the options dialog by clicking on “Settings” (the big green dot at the right of the toolbar) and “Options”. Inside the dialog are four tabs, select the “Buttons” tab. From here, we can customize what buttons we wish to appear on the toolbar, but we can also use it customize the buttons themselves. Select the “GMail” button in the Custom Buttons list, and click “Edit”.
A new dialog should pop up called “Edit Toolbar Custom Button”, and should have the GMail button image and name inside of it. Click where it says “Use the Advanced Editor”. This will load a Google XML editor in a new Firefox window or tab.
Much of this XML may be confusing, but I can make it easy for you. First, find the “<search>” tag. Replace the entire text between the start tag and the end tag with “http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/#search/{query}”. The next tag should be the “<site>” tag. Simply replace it with “http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/”.
Moving on to the “<feed>” tag, replace the text with “http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/feed/atom”. Finally, I would suggest finding the “<update>” tag close to the bottom, and removing it all together. This should wrap it up, so click the “Save to Google Toolbar” button, and click “Replace” in the next dialog.
I have read where the new version of Google Toolbar may take care of these issues, but I suspect that Google may be waiting on Firefox 3 to release. Until then, we have to make do.
Are there any other quick fixes that you know of? Feel free to share.
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November 19th, 2008
doesn’t work with ver. 5 no advanced options.
any suggestioins?
December 22nd, 2008
I, too, do not have any advanced settings. There is just a link which lets me request the button be updated by Google periodically. Any ideas? I really want to make my apps account the default for everything if possible.
January 13th, 2009
Nice solution. Works just great so thanks for sharing.
With some rather lame pattern matching, I tried to get this same approach to work on the Google Calendar toolbar button but with no joy. Have you been able to get that to work?