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.
No no, I'm of the same opinion
Can I ask why you think that's too short? It seems like a long time for no activity on an account. And they are fairly generous about defining activity.
This seems reasonable to me.
Someone in jail for a two year stint that ends in December may be emerging to find the email they had for twenty years, which may be the key to most of their other accounts, is gone, which could be hugely impactful.
In my personal life, I do now have the unfortunate task of reminding people to log into dead relative's email accounts so they can preserve some shit they need, which kind of sucks.
The jail one seems a little "edge case" but the dead relative one is interesting. I think Google's "takeout" would help with that.
How do we define edge case? Incarceration is a fact of life, and in the US we have somewhere around one in a hundred Americans jailed. It's not an insubstantial sum of people, and like military deployments, is something that should be accounted for when looking at scenarios where someone might be away from their computer for a sum of time.