How to re-enable Google mail?

Question

In attempt to downgrade my phone to be a bit more dumb during vacation, I disabled synchronisation on my Google account inside the email settings.

I was a bit surprised when the email tile disappeared off the start screen but figured I'd work out what to do later.

Later is now, and I discover that in my email settings, the Google account is there, but grayed out. It is impossible to select or delete, and I can't re-add because it says "already exists".

I've searched around a bit and found others with the same or similar problems, and I've tried the soft-resets-in-airplane-mode with no success.

So, before doing the full hard reset, I wondered if anyone might have a less drastic solution?

Failing that, what are the chances that restoring apps and settings after the hard reset will also restore this faulty configuration?

Answer 1

If you're willing and able to do some registry hacking, I could tell you how to find the settings for email accounts, though you'll need a pretty privileged registry editor to mess with them.

Otherwise, your best bet short of a hard-reset is probably to turn on IMAP access for your Gmail account, and then set it up as an IMAP account on the phone. Unfortunately, this will only give you email sync, no contacts or calendar data.

It's unlikely that the screwed-up state would persist across a hard-reset, but it's unlikely that it would happen in the first place, so I don't have a good answer.