this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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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.
If I logged back into an account (in any system) I hadn't used in years and found it was gone, I wouldn't be that surprised. If I got into the account but found the information it held was gone, I'd be pissed. One is simple upkeep, the other feels like tampering.
That being said, if you haven't even accessed anything in an account in several years, why have it? The only thing I can think of where you wouldn't ever have accessed it (thereby keeping it alive in Google's definition) would be as archived storage. That's pretty dangerous to do in someone else's cloud, assuming it will be fine. Even active storage it's still recommended to have redundancy in backup locations.
I used some of those free websites years ago for storage and holding animation movies. They would have a policy of removing an account after only a month of inactivity. So while I was using them I'd make sure to log in regularly...I did not expect them to keep things around when I moved on to other things, it's why I copied the files I wanted to keep to other places locally.
Email is a bit different to me than like cloud storage, because so much gets tied there -- social media, banking, etc., that I don't like the idea of gambling with it unless I'm sure an account is a throwaway. People incarcerated, hospitalized or dead may not be able to regularly access their email, yet the information inside may be vital to them and their family.
Ghoulish, but as I mentioned earlier, now I have to remind people to be sure to log into their dead relative's email accounts to preserve information.
Which is why you need at least 1 account recovery email that isn't yours, and that person should have your password/2FA key saved somewhere secure.
As for dead relatives, I've had a couple and I exported all their data, deleted everything from the account, and I check them around once per year. I figure 5 years is enough, but by 10, there isn't really any reason to keep it going.