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A warning has been issued to Gmail users as Google begins to delete accounts.
People could be at risk of losing their Gmail accounts if it falls into a particular category set by Google.
The tech giant dominates the email market, boasting an estimated 1.8 billion users for Gmail.
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It’s no wonder then, that when the company starts talking about deleting accounts, that a lot of people start to panic.
But not everyone will be at risk of losing access to their emails and there are steps you can take to prevent it from happening.
First of all, you need to make sure your account is active because it’s only inactive accounts that are getting the chop.
An inactive Google account is defined in their policy as being one that hasn’t been used within the last two years across all of its contents.
This includes Gmail, Google Docs, Drive, Meet, Calendar and Photos.
So, if you’ve got an old account that hasn’t been used in a while, but might have some important documents or data in it that you don’t want to lose, then you should probably make sure it’s active again.
According to Google, there are three simple things that are considered to be activity.
These actions are reading or sending an email, sharing a photo or watching a YouTube video while being signed into the account, and using Google Drive or Search.
If you do any of those things at least once a year then it should mean that your account is safe from being deleted.
It might be the case that you have multiple Gmail accounts and you’re struggling to manage them all.
If this is your situation, then it might be worth getting your different accounts to all filter into one Gmail inbox, which will help you to avoid any accounts becoming inactive.
All you have to do is add a filtering rule so that everything sent to one email address is automatically forwarded to another.
This will mean that switching between your accounts will be more straightforward, however, this might also come with a catch.
It’ll also mean that if someone else gains access to your device, they could access all of your email accounts.
So, it’s important to be vigilant and to make sure that your accounts and devices are all properly secured.
One way of doing this would be activating a two-factor authentication for logging into your accounts.
