There are some problems in computer science that are hard. And there are some problems in computer science that we struggle to fix.
There is overlap between these two, but not completely. And one of the problems that shouldn't be that hard, but often is, is merging two accounts.
This can happen if you login to a service using your custom domain email and your gmail, for instance. Or if you use social media login and have several backing e-mail accounts.
My Google story
I registered for gmail back in 2004. It was just launched, and the way we used e-mail addresses were not mature yet. Combined with the fact that I was a teenager, and all the addresses I had had until then were some kind of funny, or at least figuring a nickname. To 16-year old me, like most people about my age, my year of birth was a frequent part of nicknames and addresses, so I ended up with a gmail address consisting of my name and my year of birth.
Fair back then. Today, not so much. It feels unprofessional and childish.
So a while ago, I created a new account with the industry standard of firstname.lastname as address instead.
So far, so good. But what about my 20+ years of email correspondence, Google Drive files, favourites on YouTube and Google Maps?
Couldn't I just rename my existing account? No, not possible.
Couldn't I just merge the old and the new account? No, not possible.
Finally, my solution was to handle each service manually, through export and import. Thankfully, Google provides such for most of the services.
The surprising link
After I took my newest Java certification, I discovered that my first Java certification was registered on a different Oracle account than the two newest ones.
A few seconds of frustration later, I saw the magical link glowing at me: "merge accounts". So I provided my two account ids that I wanted to merge, and the associated e-mail addresses, clicked send, and the day after, my two accounts were merged.
Granted, this is nowhere near the most complex application nor account out there. Nevertheless, it's the way I want it to be. Everywhere.