Hearing that Google is deleting old accounts might make you wonder if that old college or work email will disappear as soon as the calendar hits December 1, but it doesn’t look like it will happen that quickly. The announcement Google put out claimed that these accounts would not all be deleted at once but would be removed in phases. Google will start with accounts that were created but never used and then work its way down to ones that had more usage before going idle.
Google has also claimed that it intends to send multiple email notifications to users with inactive accounts in the months prior to their deletion. These messages will be sent to the associated account email and recovery email. This should give you ample time to log back into your account if you wish to save it from deletion. You might not even have to reset that old, long-forgotten password, as Google is now switching to using passkeys by default. Once you’re in, all you have to do is read or send an email, and the account will once again be considered active. Even simple tasks like watching a YouTube video or performing a Google search while logging into your account will remove it from the deletion list.
Of course, if you don’t need a two-year-old Gmail account anymore, you can always delete it yourself or wait and let Google do it for you.