Act now to save your old Gmail account before it’s too late!
The clock is ticking down to December 1st when Google will start enforcing an updated inactive account policy. So don’t delay, act now to save your old Gmail and Photos content. Here’s everything you need to know and do.
11/28 updates below. This article was originally published on November 26.
With just hours to go until the December 1 deadline when Google starts enforcing an updated inactive account policy, users are understandably concerned about what will happen to their content such as Gmail messages, photos, and documents.
The good news is that, for the vast majority of Gmail and Photos users, their accounts will remain safe from the content deletions to come. That’s because most of the 1.8 billion Gmail users and 2 billion Google Photos users have active accounts.
In Google policy terms, they have accessed their Google accounts within the last two years. Although no statistics are available to reveal just how many inactive Google accounts there are, if the number is just 1%, that would still mean 18 million Gmail users and 20 million Google Photos users in the crosshairs. That’s a lot of messages and photos about to go to the great trashcan in the sky.
The official reason is that of improving security. As Ruth Kricheli, a vice president of product management at Google, said in a May 2023 update, “If an account hasn’t been used for an extended period of time, it is more likely to be compromised.” Take the Google Account security checkup when logging into your old account
11/28 update: While data from inactive Google accounts, including Google Photos and Gmail content, is likely to be deleted from December 1, other Google-held data appears to have already gone missing in action, according to some users. Google Drive users have been reporting how their data has disappeared,
