I know this sounds dumb probably but 2 years is too short a time. Considering how email is basically the backbone of the Internet deleting old accounts after 2 years sounds nightmarish. People will be forever locked out of things. I even have like 6 Gmail accounts I use for different things. Like I’m going to have to login and rotate through them every now and again just to be sure.

Needs to be like five years or something considering they were presumably eternity before. You can still use Hotmail accounts.

If they recycle the email address so other people can use them that’s a whole other bag of worms. Like people.will find old email lists and try recreating them and seeing what they can get into. Expect your dead grandma to be suddenly posting on Facebook soon about great opportunities.

I get like emptying data out. Sure delete all their drive files and emails after 2 years but the account itself should never be.

Oh that's fucked up, that means really fucking old videos on YouTube could be lost.

Once an account is deleted will you be able to make a new account with the old email? This could be a security nightmare for old accounts tied to google email addresses.

I gave up completely on Google accounts after they kept flagging make-believe security issues and made it near impossible to verify that it's yours.

Even if you have a secondary email configured (and this would be what it's for) - but oh, no, that's still not good enough for them.

Then they pulled the utter bullshit of requiring your phone number "so they can make sure it's you" - but since there was never a phone number associated with the account, this is clearly nothing more than a data grab so they can associate real identities with their accounts.

That was the last straw for me, and I decided that their service was utter garbage, completely unreliable, and not worth using anymore.

Thanks for the heads up.

And the enshittification continues.

Maybe they got all the data they needed out of Gmail.

Will that trigger accounts old.....myspace accounts for example to auto close/delete when they finally have invalid emails??? For science....

How does this work for a google account that I've got linked in gmail to my standard google account? Is that classed as active or do I need to login to each one manually still?

I've been trying to recover a Gmail account for years. Nothing I do will give me access.

How does that work? Some emails are just for setting up access to things and are never used. Like gaming accounts, verification purposes etc. You would lose access to stuff you regularly use because you can't verify.

This would mean losing parts of your internet identity.

Wonder how many YouTube videos will be lost?

And the Enshittification of google begins ...

Maybe this is an internet inflection point. Reddit, Twitter, and now Google/Gmail death rattles heared around. What are some Google/Gmail decentralized alternatives? Some might be depressed, but I'm excited about this new possible internet! I love the idea of decentralized internet protocols! Back to origins of online communication without CEOs, shareholders, and large marketing firms all trying to squeeze us for every nickle and dime.

***together with all data **