You can probably understand my frustration when, after reading this post, I logged in to my account only to find that the “Accounts” menu described here as well as Gmail’s own help page didn’t even exist! I assumed that it’s a feature that they’re releasing to users in batches and left it at that.

After a few months passed I decided to check if they’d been so kind as to finally give me this feature. To my disappointment the option still wasn’t available. Then for some inexplicable reason, I got a hunch – “I wonder if my language has something to do with the menu being missing?”. I usually change my language setting to English(UK) or English(Australia) if it’s available. I think my hunch may’ve been because I’m now superstitious about language settings after all sorts of problems with Eclipse and English(Australia) on Windows XP (I can’t wait for my Mac, please send it soon Apple fairy, pretty please). So anyway, I decided to change this setting to English(US) and walla voila, the “Accounts” menu appeared! In fact it looks like Gmail uses an entirely different version of its client depending on the language you select. An interesting i8n strategy :)

So folks, at least until they decide to support From Masking for languages other than English(US), it looks like we’re going to have to choose between this and a friendly spell checker.