Gmail, watch your email address from December 1st

Watch out for Gmail account: from December 1st a good number of addresses will come deactivated.

What are they? Of those on which they did not register access for at least two years.

But what does “access” mean? For the giant these are actions such as, naturally, sending messages but also simply reading an email from any device, as well as accessing Drive files, watching a clip on YouTube with your profile or sharing of images on Google Photos. If none of these actions have been carried out in the last two years, perhaps on addresses opened for a purpose (an event, a festival, a professional initiative), these will be deleted together with all the linked data.

As is known, in fact, the Gmail address is in fact the username to access Mountain View’s broad portfolio of services and products. The basic idea is therefore to eliminate the so-called extemporaneous addresses that have no longer been used for a couple of years. The provision concerns only personal accounts, not those linked to organizations such as companies or schools. From December 1st Google will delete content and account datafrom emails to any documents stored in Drive, in Photos, in calendars and so on.

Don’t worry: notifications will arrive within the next few days. Both to the account in question and to any additional address inserted for data recovery. Some other exceptions include using the account to make purchases on the Play Store or having a digital gift card with a balance to spend. “Google products,” the giant said in a statement, “reserve the right to delete your data when your account has not been used for a period of 2 years. Due to these policies, the inactive account will be deleted by December 1, 2023.”

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