August 19, 2026
You can sign in with a username and password, or with "Continue with Google" — which one your account uses usually comes down to how you signed up. Which one you use changes a few things about your account — how it was verified, where your username came from, and how you'd recover access. Here are the differences worth knowing.
If you have 2FA turned on, it applies no matter which method you use to sign in — there's no way to require it for one login method and not the other, and no separate "Google 2FA." A trusted device skips the code the same way regardless of which button you clicked to get there.
A password account has to click a verification link before it can log in — that's not optional. A Google account skips this step entirely: your account is verified the moment it's created, since Google has already confirmed your email address before VerifyFiltering ever sees it.
Signing up with a password means typing and choosing your own username. Signing up with Google skips that too — your username is generated automatically from your Google name, falling back to your email address if your name doesn't produce anything usable, and falling back to a generic name if neither does — with a number appended if that username's already taken. If you're wondering where an unfamiliar-looking username came from, this is why.
If you already have a password account, someone else can't take it over with "Continue with Google" just by knowing your email address — the attempt is refused outright, and they're told to log in with a username and password instead. And in practice, they'd need to actually control the Google account behind that email to even get that far, since Google only hands over an address it has verified itself.
If you signed up with Google, your Security page says password management is handled through your Google account — but that's not the whole picture. Your account doesn't actually have a password stored at all until you set one, and "Forgot Password" will let you do exactly that: enter your email, follow the reset link, and set one. Once you do, you can sign in either way — with your new password, or by continuing with Google — and the Security page starts showing the normal password form instead of that message.
Completing a reset still requires access to your actual email inbox — the same requirement as any password reset, so this isn't a way for someone else to get into your account. What it does mean is that your account's real recovery path is your email inbox, not your Google account's own protections — those aren't automatically the same thing. If a "reset your password" email ever shows up that you weren't expecting, don't click it — reach out to support if you're unsure why you got it, and turn on 2FA if you haven't already.