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Google Plans to Delete Accounts That Haven't Been Used in Over Two Years

SSDGUY said:
Yup. They're just horrible. I had a few videos on youtube that got decent traffic, noting monetized, but I took it all down. Felt like they were creeping in all around me … "I signed up for all this?" Couldn't get rid of them fast enough. If I ever get back into youtube, I'll probably use a dedicated email and debit card with limited funds.
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I would love it if Apple, or even Amazon, built a video streaming competitor like YouTube. And I know, Amazon has Twitch, but it’s just not the same.

YouTube is almost a monopoly of video content. I say almost because we have Vimeo, DailyMotion, Nebula… but they are pretty irrelevant.
 
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dontwalkhand said:
I think this is fair. If you haven't touched a Gmail account in 2 years, why should they have to hold onto your data? Back it up to your own drives and keep it in multiple locations if you want it for archival purposes.
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The whole point of Gmail was originally so you never have to delete an email again. This goes against the reasons a lot of people signed up for Gmail in the first place
 
Populus said:
I would love it if Apple, or even Amazon, built a video streaming competitor like YouTube. And I know, Amazon has Twitch, but it’s just not the same.

YouTube is almost a monopoly of video content. I say almost because we have Vimeo, DailyMotion, Nebula… but they are pretty irrelevant.
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Pretty hard to compete when they have such vast amounts of traffic. Folks might chip away at them — deciding they're OK with not being on as high traffic of a platform.
 
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Good. I have an old gmail account that I haven’t been able to access for years because I don’t remember the email or the password. I hope they delete it
 
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cuiver said:
If it has uploaded videos they will not delete the account.
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That’s what I was wondering. YouTube dates back to the 2000’s. I occasionally watch videos from back then. I have a hard time imagining Google is going to delete thousands (+++) of videos.
 
I’ve been thinking about dropping Gmail anyway, so this could be a good thing… I don’t use anything else from Google. Next Facebook. Twitter is already dropped. No other social media left after that except MacRumors. 👍🏻
 
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Does having an account active in the iOS or Mac email client (so that it syncs daily) count for keeping the account alive??
 
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Hmm, i have a couple of alternate gmail accounts that i use to sign up for sites i don't trust entirely.

I rarely log into those accounts, but instead auto-forward every email it receives to my main gmail account (where it's filtered into a folder)

Does this count as activity for my alternate gmails?
 
zakarhino said:
Penny pinching strategy? It's Google, I doubt some of these accounts with only a few megabytes worth of data are really hurting their margins. This is irritating because I have multiple gmail accounts that I've used to buy different services and now I have to go through and log into each one to make sure Google don't nuke them.
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But why should people be blocked from using a name because accounts have been inactive for 2 years or longer. If google is still around in 100+ years think of all the inactive accounts because the majority of account holders will be dead. 2 years before deleting it is way more than enough time to login just once.

And even if an account is only a few megabytes, may not be much until you multiply that potentially many millions of times or hundreds of millions with duplicate accounts that may not be in use.
 
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Radeon85 said:
But why should people be blocked from using a name because accounts have been inactive for 2 years or longer. If google is still around in 100+ years think of all the inactive accounts because the majority of account holders will be dead. 2 years before deleting it is way more than enough time to login just once.

And even if an account is only a few megabytes, may not be much until you multiply that potentially many millions of times or hundreds of millions with duplicate accounts that may not be in use.
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I think it’s exceptionally bad policy to recycle names.
 
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zakarhino said:
Yeah anyone can do it with a regular Gmail account. The caveat is that some services detect these aliases and block them because all they have to do it check for a '+' symbol; naturally it's also very easy to automatically extract the base email so really its only utility is for automatic inbox filtering.
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The + thing was good like 5+ years ago.

Spammers just strip the + and everything to its right and send to the base acct.

It’s also a beast to keep track of as you need an index of all the +xxxx suffixes.

Had set this up for several friends and family. A lot of work and most couldn’t manage it especially when it came to password recovery and telephone validation or contact questions re the email address.

When iCloud Keychain offered Hide My Email, it allowed me to abandon the +X architecture and issue unique email addresses for every online account.

Took some work to make this cut over, but it’s so much easier for them to issue and maintain now. Plus aside from iCloud .com domain (obvious tip off of an apple user but nothing is perfect), there is absolutely no relationship between the email address of any two accounts.
 
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zakarhino said:
Penny pinching strategy? It's Google, I doubt some of these accounts with only a few megabytes worth of data are really hurting their margins. This is irritating because I have multiple gmail accounts that I've used to buy different services and now I have to go through and log into each one to make sure Google don't nuke them.
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Is it really that irritating to log in to your accounts once every 2 years?
 
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coolfactor said:
You can use "+tagging" to create different email addresses without having to juggle multiple separate accounts.


Each service sees a different email address for you, but you receive all emails in a single account, and you can use filters/tagging to automatically move messages to folders specific to each service, almost as if you have separate Inboxes.

  • Inbox-ACME
  • Inbox-XYZ
  • ... etc.
I applaud Google for doing this purging. Services like Twitter have let usernames be stale for 10 years, and it's a disgrace when those usernames could be used by actual people or companies, not wasting space for nothing.
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The problem is that spammers (or really everyone) know that those "+" addresses are really all just fred@flintstone.com. If you want actual privacy and spam mitigation, you use different addresses.
 
Populus said:
I would love it if Apple, or even Amazon, built a video streaming competitor like YouTube. And I know, Amazon has Twitch, but it’s just not the same.

YouTube is almost a monopoly of video content. I say almost because we have Vimeo, DailyMotion, Nebula… but they are pretty irrelevant.
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While I'm not a friend of Google, I'm actually glad that I only have to deal with a single service for YouTube-style video conttent. As opposed to having to deal with a zillion streaming services.
 
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