Gmail account self-destruct option helps the account to kill itself when its primary account holder dies. What happens to your email account after you die doesn’t need to be a mystery for you. That’s why you should consider reading this article if you want your account to take care of itself after you expire.
Thanks to the modern wonder of cloud computing, your data collection will outlast you for a long beyond. Unless you set your entire Google account to self-destruct after your death — which, thanks to Google’s Inactive Account Manager, you can do easily.
How to get your Gmail account self-destruct option
To make this decision easier think about the contents of your email account. Do you want to transfer all your lifelong data to someone? Or do you want to completely remove it from assistance once your account becomes inactive for a long period?
Once you’re gone, is there really a reason for this compendium of deeply revealing data to sit for who knows how long on Google’s servers?
As Per Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s blog post in June 2020, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content — such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and Photos — for advertising purposes,” explained a Google spokesperson over email.
Google announced in only 2017 that it would stop scanning the contents of users’ Gmail inboxes for advertising purposes. Policies, in other words, can change given enough time. And there’s a lot of time after you die.
Setting your Gmail account to self-destruct after you die can be just another part of getting your affairs in order. No one wants to leave behind a mess, even if it’s only a digital one.
How to enable Gmail to self-destruct?
Turning on Google’s Inactive Account Manager is a quick process. And there are various settings you can tweak you want to make sure you do it in a way that makes sense for you.
When you switch on this setting it uses account inactivity as a set-off point. So, for example, if you don’t log into your Google account for a predetermined amount of time it’s only then — after Google attempts to contact you — that the Inactive Account Manager goes into effect.
- Log into your Google account.
- Go to Google’s Inactive Account Manager page.
- Select “Start.”
- Choose how long Google should wait before it considers you gone — dead, or otherwise. Twelve months of inactively seems like a good amount of time, but tweak that setting to your liking.
- Now, because you don’t want your account being deleted on accident, Google gives you the option of entering a cellphone number as a backup contact method. “Before we take any action,” explains Google, “we’ll contact you multiple times by SMS and email.” Enter your cellphone number here.
- Decide which “contact email” you want to use.