Consumer vs. Lehigh Gmail

Staff and students who have a personal Gmail account are sometimes concerned that a Lehigh Gmail account will interfere with their existing account. Fortunately this is not the case.

Lehigh Gmail is separate from any other Google account you may have!. Lehigh has an educational agreement with Google, and our Lehigh Google G Suite runs in a separate domain from consumer-based Google services. If you have a personal/consumer account, note that the two accounts are completely separate. You do not have to worry about accidental merging, overlap, or drifting of your information/email/files/calendar info from one account to another. If you choose to share data/files/calendars there are ways to explicitly share things between to two accounts -- however this is a multi-step process requiring confirmation from you, the account owner.

Lehigh Gmail is managed/housed primarily by Google, Inc.. Our G Suite service is managed in part by a local Lehigh administrator who handles the configuration of services. Lehigh does not own the servers that house the data or the applications -- Google does. Lehigh G Suite falls under the category of cloud services and our agreement conforms to the guidelines outlined in Lehigh’s Cloud Services Policy.

Many, if not most of the features of Lehigh Gmail and Lehigh G Suite will be identical to the consumer version of Gmail. For users who are familiar with the consumer version of Gmail, there are a few differences.

Logging in to Lehigh Gmail vs. Consumer Gmail

To access Lehigh Gmail:

Open a web browser.
Go to Lehigh’s Gmail landing page (g.lehigh.edu or lehigh.edu/google) or to the Campus Portal and click on the mail icon in the upper right-hand corner.
When prompted for credentials, type in your Lehigh username and password. If this is the first time you are logging in you need to agree to the terms of service.

To log into the consumer version of Gmail, you must have a consumer account. The address for consumer Gmail is gmail.com.

Using public kiosks

There may be times (when travelling or using public kiosks) when you may not be able to type the specific address for Lehigh Gmail. When you are only given the option for the consumer Gmail login, there is a workaround.

Go to the consumer Gmail login at gmail.com.
Type your full email address in the username blank (e.g., sek409@lehigh.edu).
Leave the password empty.
Click on Sign In.
This will take you to the Lehigh Gmail login screen where you can sign in as usual.

Note that your Lehigh Gmail account is in a special educational domain. Whenever you are presented with a consumer or general Gmail login, or if you are configuring your mobile device with a consumer Google app, you will use your full email address (e.g., sek409@lehigh.edu). If you omit @lehigh.edu, Google will not recognize your credentials.

Lehigh Contacts

You will notice that Lehigh’s staff directory service is integrated with Lehigh Gmail -- that is, when you type a Lehigh username or a person’s first or last name, the system autocompletes what you type.

Lehigh Sharing

G Suite is designed to support collaborative work, and sharing files and resources is easy in G Suite. Most of the Lehigh Google applications offer the ability/option to share work, files and resources within the Lehigh community only. This means that users with a Lehigh username/password can potentially view the resource, while “the rest of the world” -- the general public -- cannot. You may have noted this feature in Lehigh Google Calendar or Drive. In Gmail, this feature is available as well. For example, you can share attached images with the Lehigh community--see the option “Share all images--when images are attached to a message.

Lehigh Branding

If you have a non-Lehigh Gmail account (a consumer account), you can tell the difference between the accounts because Lehigh’s Gmail is branded with the “stacked’ logo in the upper right-hand side.