of course losing access to your google or gmail account will be annoying. If you’ve forgotten your password, or if someone else got into your account and changed it, Google provides a list of actions you can take to regain access to your account. Indeed, they can be useful at times, but password recovery methods for Google accounts tend to change from time to time and relying on them as a fallback is never a good idea.
Not only have we provided all the necessary links in the “Password recovery” section down below for those who have lost access to certain accounts, but we’ll today be focusing on what can be done to ensure you never lose access to your account again. Here are some things to consider:
back up your data regularly
If you have a current backup of your data, it will be less hassle if you ever lose access to your account. takeout is the name that google has given to the function that allows you to download your data. You can download all the data from all your Google apps or just part of the data from some of them. You can even decide to download the data of a single application, such as Gmail, from your Google account.
For each type of data, the download formats are different. for example, mbox files can be imported into gmail or most other email services and applications.
keep your old passwords
Keep a copy of your old passwords in case you forget your current one. Google uses this method to verify your identity if you ever lose your password. In the event that you have not updated your password for a while, you may not be able to remember your old password. It’s a good idea to keep a copy of your old Google passwords in a safe place when you change your password.
When you use a password manager like passwork, you can keep track of your old passwords. therefore, we strongly recommend using one. when you set a new password on an app or website, most password managers only allow you to update the current entry; however, with a password manager, you can create a new password and then go back and rename the old one to something like “gmail — old password”. btw, this is also a problem with apple keychain – when you change your password, it asks if you want to update your old password. obviously you’ll hit “refresh” and bam, your old password will be lost to the void. so keep an eye on that.
why is this important? well, as we have hinted, google asks you to enter the old password in some cases as a fallback plan.
fill in recovery information
google offers you many ways to recover your password:
- Go to your Google account and choose “Security” from the left-hand column
- Scroll all the way down to “Ways that we can verify that it’s you”
- Fill them in
- PROFIT
Google will now use those options to retrieve your password when needed, or just to verify it’s you when strange login behavior is detected. Among all the options, the ‘recovery phone’ is the most convenient. believe me, you will forget that ‘security question’ in just a few days. ‘recovery email’, to be honest, isn’t secure enough – we earthlings tend to use weak passwords, so your account could be compromised if a hacker manages to guess your password from ‘nickname, date of birth’.
remember the day you signed up
If all else fails, Google may ask you to provide an estimated date of when you created the account. the best way to get this date is by looking for a welcome email from gmail.
To locate the welcome email, go to the “all mail” folder on your computer (you may need to click “more” to expand the folders to view it). you can also hover over the page information in the top right corner and choose “oldest”.
This will move the email you received first to the top of the list. If, on the other hand, you imported non-gmail emails into your inbox before 2004, the welcome email won’t appear at the top of the inbox hierarchy. Also, if you haven’t imported all your emails, you’ll run into some problems.
The email can also be found by searching for “welcome”, “gmail team”, “gmail-noreply@google.com”, or “googlecommunityteam-noreply@google.com”, among other similar words and phrases.
however, when I personally tried it, I couldn’t find it. this is because I delete all mail from my account once a year. for people like me, there is a weird trick: the settings popup can show the date you created your gmail account. To access them, click the gear icon in the upper right corner, select view all settings, then click forwarding and pop/imap .
Look for the Status line in the POP download section. If you’re fortunate, you’ll come upon the following information:
“status: popup is enabled for all mail that has arrived since [this is your date]”
important:
If you have ever changed your pop settings, the date you created your gmail account will not be displayed.
password recovery
There is only one place where you can recover your password: it is this “google recovery” page. everything else is probably phishing scams. the only other fallback option, in case an adversary loses your password, is the “can’t sign in to your google account” page.
Basically, you should follow the instructions on screen and pray to Google’s mothership that hope shall be restored.
If your prayers have not been heard and all pages go through a “try again” loop, please visit the “Tips for completing account recovery steps” page. helped me several times to understand exactly what google wants from me
The last page you can visit, if all else fails, is “create a replacement google account”.
conclusion
If you have important data stored in any cloud: gmail, google drive, docs, etc., please backup using offline storage. use two-factor authentication to always keep your mobile phone as a recovery option. keep your password change history and remember the date you registered your account.