Well, I don't remember having to do it before, but I've around x10 for a few years and things have changed. After adding that account and fiddling with the gmail forwarder its connected to, all seems well.
My sincere & multitude of thanks!
As of now (≈17:45 EDT) I'm still receiving this same error message and my site is unable to connect to the database.
My server is also 'vox'—the x10 status page seems to claim this is resolved. Are other aspects of this still being worked out?