Inactive Google Account Policy
support.google.com
Inactive Google Account Policy
1–10 of 83 posts
Re: Inactive Google Account Policy
#2Wish you could check your inactivity status more closely than their suggested "if you're not sure, just sign in to the Google account". I have a couple Google accounts that are just pulling email to a separate mailbox and who knows if that's active or not. Maybe I'll have to buy something on one of those accounts just to get it exempt?
Also reading this closely there's separate timers per product? This is worse than making sure my domains aren't going to expire...
Re: Inactive Google Account Policy
#3Back then, maybe two decades back, Google was seen as evil as it declined to acknowledge that it will delete user data after the user has closed its account.
Time changes.
Re: Inactive Google Account Policy
#4Wish you could check your inactivity status more closely than their suggested "if you're not sure, just sign in to the Google account". I have a couple Google accounts that are just pulling email to a separate mailbox and who knows if that's active or not. Maybe I'll have to buy something on one of those accounts just to get it exempt? Also reading this closely there's separate timers per product? This is worse than…
> I have a couple Google accounts that are just pulling email to a separate mailbox and who knows if that's active or not.
Probably not. I think the point is to ensure there's human interaction. Don't expect any automated activity to affect the timer.
Re: Inactive Google Account Policy
#5I think this is the end of my Gmail account, which has been locked for some time due to suspicious activity. All it does is forward email, but no more.
Re: Inactive Google Account Policy
#6Wish you could check your inactivity status more closely than their suggested "if you're not sure, just sign in to the Google account". I have a couple Google accounts that are just pulling email to a separate mailbox and who knows if that's active or not. Maybe I'll have to buy something on one of those accounts just to get it exempt? Also reading this closely there's separate timers per product? This is worse than…
> I have a couple Google accounts that are just pulling email to a separate mailbox and who knows if that's active or not. Probably not. I think the point is to ensure there's human interaction. Don't expect any automated activity to affect the timer.
I didn't realize that. So if I have Mozilla Thunderbird running on a computer fetching emails from an account, it isn't good enough?
> Reading or sending an email
I would need to actually mark incoming emails as read?
Re: Inactive Google Account Policy
#7I don't work for google. I use Google, I have multiple Gmail as well as hosted by Google workspace domains.
Overall I think this is reasonable. I can't see why people are upset, when the general burden to make it "live" is low.
There are specific corner case problems: people who cannot login for various reasons, can't get Google humans to help, and who get mail forwarded so are limping along. And, there are a surprisingly high number of people who seem to trip up over account recovery. If I had one criticism of google here, it's that they're judge, jury and executioner. There's no appeal mechanism for ordinary mortal. It's capricious, sometimes squeaky wheels get oiled, sometimes not.
I pay for google 1 and I takeout periodically.
Don't depend on "free" for critical functions.
Re: Inactive Google Account Policy
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have a couple Google accounts that are just pulling email to a separate mailbox and who knows if that's active or not. Probably not. I think the point is to ensure there's human interaction. Don't expect any automated activity to affect the timer.
I didn't realize that. So if I have Mozilla Thunderbird running on a computer fetching emails from an account, it isn't good enough? > Reading or sending an email I would need to actually mark incoming emails as read?
I mean, this is just my guess; I could be wrong. But the vibe I get is that you basically have to do something non-trivial via the web (log in, create something, delete something, whatever) to show that a human is paying attention to the account and not just an automated system. Don't rely on automated means like IMAP, regardless of what actions you're performing with those.
Re: Inactive Google Account Policy
#9> Before this happens, Google will give you an opportunity to take an action in your account by:
> Sending email notifications to your Google Account
> Sending notifications to your recovery email, if any exists
Further up it says that reading an email counts as being active.
So if you have IMAP access does that count when you simply read that email?!
I have gmail accounts with IMAP that haven’t logged into the web interface in years. I can’t be the only one in this boat. This is very ambiguous and troubling.
Re: Inactive Google Account Policy
#10Given that G states that "doing a search" is considered to be "activity" it shouldn't be too hard to rig up an automated account shaker which at large but not too large intervals - something between 16 and 22 months - logs in on some headless browser, searches Google for a random thing and logs out again.