Hi everyone, I have an old Google account that I don’t use anymore, and I’m thinking about deleting it. But I’m worried I may have used that email address for government services or other important accounts in the past, and I don’t want to overlook something that could cause problems later.
What should I check before deleting it? Do you have similar experience?
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If you can’t migrate something and must therefore keep it, if I may suggest, keep it logged in to some old phone with busted battery you only access sporadically.
Don’t. The signup procedure requires a smartphone now, so it might be useful to have another gmail id if you need it, without further compromising your privacy.
Yep exactly this. Creating a new account is a pain in the ass. Every now and then you’ll likely still run into some annoying services that refuse to accept anything but a “well known” email provider because we live in hell. Plus you might still have some old things tied to that account that may be needed in the future.
Set up email forwarding and then just keep it around in case you need it
Why not retain it? It won’t cost anything, and you might find a use for it eventually (I use my GMail account for automated testing of my email server).
And if you don’t trust Google to safeguard your data, delete just the data.
i can see how leaving as an black hole, where msgs go in but never get response, can be a type of obfuscation, conceptually.
i wonder if the filter rules can also be used to bounce back all msgs that arrive, without deleting the acct…nope, checked
Check your password manager. What other accounts is the e-mail address account linked to? Change it, then delete the account.
If you don’t have a password manager: Now is the time to get one. I recommend KeepassXC (PC, cross-platform) / KeepassDX (Android). Combine with Syncthing for cloudless cross-device sync of the password database file.
Also, don’t worry too much. You wouldn’t be the first to lose access to an e-mail address. Governments or “other important accounts” usually have procedures to deal with that issue. But: a Google account shouldn’t be linked to anything important anyway, let alone government accounts.
I’ve been making changes to get off Proton lately and this is my plan, but I have a question if you don’t mind? This is the first time I’ve tried self-hosting, and I’m waiting on a laptop I’m getting returned from a friend to host things like Keepass, Immich, calendars, etc. I’m trying to get my ducks in a row as best I can while I wait.
I’ve switched to Keepass from Proton Pass already, and it was significantly easier than I was expecting. Currently I’m doing things manually, every time I add/change something I copy the file to my devices, so each one has a local file.
If I understand correctly, Syncthing will, well, sync the things lol. I slap Syncthing on each device and point them to where the keepass file is located right? But is the location the local file per device or the “master” file on the laptop server? I suppose my question is: Is there a master file on the server computer (my returned laptop) that devices sync to, or can I make a change on say my phone, and everything syncs without there being a “central” host, basically Syncthing replaces “me” in my current flow? If the latter, I suppose i don’t need Keepass/Syncthing setup as a dedicated server?
Great questions, all of them! No, there need not be any “master file” - but there can be. ;) Let me lay it out for you.
There are two possible models you can build with Syncthing:
- a star-shaped client-server structure places the server at the centre of the network. The server is the central authority that always holds the “master file”, i.e. the newest version of the file, and the clients receive it from there (or don’t, if they’re already up to date). This structure, mind you, does not require dedicated server hardware: if you, say, have a phone, a notebook and a desktop PC, you can also make your phone the “server”, i.e. the only device that is connected to all the others and that “serves” everyone the newest version of your password DB.
- a meshed peer-to-peer structure has no centre - just a number of clients that are connected to all other clients. In this network, whichever device has the “newest” version of the file is the device that distributes this newest copy to all connected peers.
Which model you go for depends on how many devices you’re planning to hook up. If you only need to keep two devices in sync (e.g. your phone and your notebook), the client-server structure would probably be overkill, and actually Syncthing is typically deployed in serverless peer-to-peer scenarios.
However, if you have a lot of devices to sync, it may be more efficient to go with the client-server setup. Example time to make this more transparent!
Let’s say you go with the p2p structure because you only have a phone and a notebook hooked up to Syncthing. You configure:
- on the phone: share a folder with the notebook!
- on the notebook: share a folder with the phone!
But now you want to add another device, e.g. a desktop PC. Now you need to
- add the PC to the phone, and add the share
- add the PC to the notebook, and add the share
- add the phone and the notebook to the PC, and add the share
Otherwise you end up with a partial mesh, i.e. not every device immediately writes its changes to all others.
If you now add a fourth device that also needs to receive the share, you already have to make changes on four devices. And so on and so on. The more devices you add, the more work you need to put in.
TL;DR:
Syncthing can work without a “master file”. It can do peer-to-peer shares and work without a server. However, the more devices you need to share to, the more efficient a star-shaped / server-like architecture will become. This, however, does not require dedicated server hardware; you just decide that one of the devices will fulfil the role of the server by hooking all client devices up to it.
One last, minor correction: Syncthing only lets you share folders, not files. So you’d create a “KeePass” folder, toss your DB in there and share the folder to the receiving devices.
Thank you
I heard keepass was going hard on the AI. Is that true? I can’t find much about it tbh.
If so, that’d make me nervous for a pw manager. If not, then it seems like a legit option.
I recommend https://codeberg.org/ChiPass/ChiPass as a fork without AI.
I heard keepass was going hard on the AI. Is that true? I can’t find much about it tbh.
I can’t tell you much about that, other than
- I’ve never heard about that
- they haven’t got an agents.md or similar giveaway files in their Github repo that suggest they do
- they do have a short paragraph about GenAI in their Github that reads:
Generative AI is fast becoming a first-party feature in most development environments, including GitHub itself. If the majority of a code submission is made using Generative AI (e.g., agent-based or vibe coding) then we will document that in the pull request. All code submissions go through a rigorous review process regardless of the development workflow or submitter.
Personally, I don’t mind devs using GenAI if it’s used in a responsible fashion, i.e.
- it is used to support software engineering, not replace it: any actual creative / design work is done by humans, GenAI is only there to help with simple, but tedious tasks (writing smaller, easy-to-review code snippets, unit testing, etc.).
- there’s a human at the helm, meaning: every line of code is human-reviewed.
Also, I tend to trust projects more whose code base started long before GenAI was a thing. Typically, these have a large base of maintainers and contributors, and the people contributing code know what they’re doing. This is certainly true of Keepass.
All fair I suppose, just wondering. Thanks for the reply!
Eh, they already have your data and i doubt they actually delete it. it’s better to just keep it and use it for things that you already used it for.
@cybermonkey @ovi they have data to some point. After deleting they stop receivimg fresh data to update profile so with time it would be less and less accurate.
But it’s the same thing. You keep the account but don’t use unless for the things you already used it because they already have that data anyway and like i said i doubt they delete it, not just google but most popular services are like that; you’re just deleted from the public records but in their servers all your data is probably still there and who knows, profiting from it. Instead of deleting and never being able to access your account, you can just keep it.
Yes
So, I have a non Google, non Microsoft, and non apple email account.
- Main alias is only used to login.
- 2nd alias is my main for family & friends if needed (no SM so this is for invites, etc)
- Next alias is used for forwards from anything from my old hotmail (mostly for Xbox), gmail, etc. This way I know it’s not important, but it’s “accessible”. Plus, not MS nor Screwgle know my real email address.
- My junk aliases (3) is for any Sign ups, accts, etc. Mostly 1 for financial stuff, 1 for utilities, bills, insurance, one for anything else.
Yes, in total, I have at least 6 email account aliases, but it helps to mitigate companies building data profiles on me, and also helps to know who sold what data if spam picks up.
Edit: OHHH Don’t lemme forget, I have an old Classic Outlook setup from an old computer. Before I quit using these old email accounts, I configured as IMAP in Outlook and them exported to a .pst file. Now all my old email is in an archive file if I ever need to refer back to it.
There is probably a way migrate or at least export your contacts and email history so that you save any important conversations or contacts for future reference.
In my experience, most places have been understanding and updated my contact when I said I was registered with an old email address that I no longer have access to. If it’s a government service they’ll have other information of yours that you can verify yourself with. Make a note of deleted account names in case they are needed for verification.
If you’re really uncertain, you could set up forwarding to your new email address and retain the old one for some time without using it before you delete.
If you don’t know all of your accounts made with this account, you might want to wait for 2-3 years to get mails about accounts you forgot about. I think it’s safe after that point. I did this before I finally delete my Google account and actually got some mails like these.
