Google App upgrade heck: conflicting email accounts

Google continues to upgrade old Google Apps accounts. It's part of their mandate to unify identities. The new Google (G+) is ruthlessly focused on owning our identities. That's not all bad, because the alternative is probably Facebook.

Still, it's pretty bad.

This has unexpected consequences. I used to use a Google Apps email address as a backup for my personal gmail address. Different accounts mind you.

Now Google doesn't seem to allow that. They seem to be enforcing a 1:1 relationship between Google Account and email address....

Alternate email addresses can only be associated with one Google Account at a time. In some cases, a person who shares an item with your alternate email address will be able to see your primary email address

This seems borderline insane, so perhaps this is a conversion bug.

Or not ...

PS. To make things even more interesting, the Google Apps account was a Dreamhost managed (ISP) extension to their services, and it wasn't supposed to have any email (DH managed email). Yech.

Update: Even though there was no gmail service associated with my Google Apps email, it was newly associated with a Google account. So it had to be. I created a new email address through Dreamhost and made that a recovery account for my primary gmail account.