Has Google unexpectedly deleted your Gmail? What's your story?

[Gabefair]

I'm curious how, if at all, if you ever got it back. What did you lose?

Since people get their gmails deleted all the time for random unexplained reasons, I'm curious about this from a contingency perspective.

20 years of google account tied to one's gmail, gone would be quite traumatic for most people.

 

[Zalosath]

3 minutes ago, Gabefair said:

I'm curious how, if at all, if you ever got it back. What did you lose?

Since people get their gmails deleted all the time for random unexplained reasons, I'm curious about this from a contingency perspective.

20 years of google account tied to one's gmail, gone would be quite traumatic for most people.

 

I've never had a gmail get deleted, but if it did I'd be very mad about losing my Google One subscription and all of my photos!

[Digital_Wizard]

I've not had my account deleted either, but seeing how often it happens to other people I have started to move away from relying on my gmail account so heavily:

• My phone photos are automatically back up locally and on a third party cloud service, so I won't lose anything there.
• I've moved all my smart home bits to Home Assistant rather than linking it to Google Home.
• My Google Drive is now completely clear, and again for important documents I use a local copy synced to the cloud.
• I don't use Google as a single sign on for anything - always creating an account manually where possible.
• Moved my domains off Google domains.
• Anything I bought on Google books I've found an epub version which again I can store offline.

If I did lose my account it would still be a lot of hassle as mostly every online account I have is linked to my gmail address - and whilst I do have my own domain and emails, I'm not ready to go through the trouble of moving all my accounts across to it yet as the final contingency!

[whispous]

I've not heard of this being a thing at all.

[manikyath]

i know google has a system for deleting dormant accounts, i vaguely recall getting a mail about this for the account i used for my 3cx test VM... but that hadnt been used in years.

 

on that note - i just went to check, the account is still there, despite a warning about a round of inactive account removals in december 2023.. and not a single mail in this inbox was read since 2019.

 

but since it may be useful, here's what google suggests you do to not have your account marked as inactive and suitable for removal. following actions all count as being an active account:

- logging in, at least once every two years

- read or send an E-mail

- use google drive

- watch a youtube video

- share a photo

- download an app

- use google search (while logged on, presumably)

- use sign-on with google in another app.

 

other things can exclude you from removal all together:

- you have a currently active subscription tied to the account.

- your account is linked to a gift card with remaining balance.

- your account is owner of a published app that has some form of financial transactions.

- your account is the manager of an active "underage person" account.

- you have made a purchase of a digital product in the past (book, movie, etc.)

 

if your account is disabled for malicious activity (crimes) it is disabled and you can still log on to find out the reason why.

 

i see no evidence for anything else happening, so i doubt this is an actual issue one should be worried about.

[Erioch]

1 hour ago, whispous said:

I've not heard of this being a thing at all.

Yeah, me neither.  Although I vaguely remember hearing that if you haven't used it in years or something it could go away.

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, Gabefair said:

I'm curious how, if at all, if you ever got it back. What did you lose?

Since people get their gmails deleted all the time for random unexplained reasons, I'm curious about this from a contingency perspective.

20 years of google account tied to one's gmail, gone would be quite traumatic for most people.

 

i've never, ever, heard of anyone having their gmail deleted.

 

I suspect two scenarios are true:

a) "hacking" where someone got into the account and then to cover their tracks they deleted it

b) "expiry" where google said they were going to delete it (This is what yahoo embarrassingly does, and says they will delete everything if you don't log in every 12 months.)

 

[Erioch]

This was from last year:  https://www.npr.org/2023/11/27/1215285876/google-inactive-account-delete-policy#:~:text=Google says it's deleting inactive,more likely to be compromised.

[tkitch]

On 3/28/2024 at 8:04 PM, Kisai said:

b) "expiry" where google said they were going to delete it (This is what yahoo embarrassingly does, and says they will delete everything if you don't log in every 12 months.)

this is a thing.

 

And I get alerts from Yahoo occasionally telling me "Log into your account or it'll be terminated"  (So I log in once, and then proceed to ignore it again until the next alert.)

 

GMail can do similar alerts, if you have it configured.

[ninebot]

this might not be a "deleting issue" per se but just as bad - since two factor authentication has become enabled it is very difficult to log in once you change your phone number, which is what happened in my case. i was not able to verify my identify for google and lost access to an important gmail account, despite having the password. whoever tried to contact google about something like to resolve the issues knows it's mission impossible... so after a lot of struggle and attempts to get it back i simply gave up. short of showing up at google headquarters i don't see me getting back into that account ever again. really frustrating. long story short, make sure you have a backup in place so you don't have to rely on just one source for those emails. you can loose access to it at any time without warning.

[CoveWolf]

I read awhile back on googles faq that if you have any active subscription, or any purchases on your account. EX: a payed app on the play store or a movie on YouTube. Then google would exempt your account from the deleting thing. But that was a while ago so don’t quote me on that. Either way sorry for anyone who lost an account, that sucks!

[Guest]

I've made a ton of throwaway and a couple personal Gmail accounts in the past. I've never heard of them being deleted by Gmail, but I hope it's true because I still don't want that data just sitting on their server even though it's probably not that important anymore.