Why you should log into that old Gmail account today

It’s a good day to log into that old Gmail profile.

Google is going to start deleting some people’s accounts in December, the company has announced. The Bay Area tech giant will shut down accounts that haven’t been used or signed into for two years, according to a May blog post from Ruth Kricheli, a Google vice president. When an account is deleted, a user will lose access to its Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos. The move, according to Kricheli, is about security; she wrote that “forgotten or unattended” accounts are more likely to be compromised.

“Our internal analysis shows abandoned accounts are at least 10x less likely than active accounts to have 2-step-verification set up,” Kricheli wrote. “Meaning, these accounts are often vulnerable, and once an account is compromised, it can be used for anything from identity theft to a vector for unwanted or even malicious content, like spam.”

Google accounts, along with storing old contacts and messages, often serve as people’s login credentials across the internet. If you’re hoping to avoid losing access to an email address that might be linked with a bank or another important web profile, Google shared some simple ways to keep it active. The safest bet to maintain an old account is to log in and then do, well, pretty much anything. According to Kricheli’s blog post, sending or reading an email, watching a YouTube video or using Google search will all be enough to keep the account alive.

Users that log back into an old account may find an email from an “accounts.google.com” address suggesting that they strengthen their account’s security by adding a phone number or recovery email. The company also has an “Inactive Account Manager” tool, in which Kricheli encouraged users to enroll in case they forget their account. 

Google will begin its purge with accounts that were created and never used again, Kricheli wrote. The company is only planning to delete accounts that haven’t been signed into for two years, and won’t delete accounts that have posted videos to YouTube. The company also plans to remove users’ pictures from Google Photos if they don’t sign into the platform every two years, Kricheli wrote.

Hear of anything happening at Google or another tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at [email protected] or on Signal at 628-204-5452.