Overall I think this is reasonable. I can't see why people are upset, when the general burden to make it "live" is low.

There are specific corner case problems: people who cannot login for various reasons, can't get Google humans to help, and who get mail forwarded so are limping along. And, there are a surprisingly high number of people who seem to trip up over account recovery. If I had one criticism of google here, it's that they're judge, jury and executioner. There's no appeal mechanism for ordinary mortal. It's capricious, sometimes squeaky wheels get oiled, sometimes not.

I pay for google 1 and I takeout periodically.

Don't depend on "free" for critical functions.

Also reading this closely there's separate timers per product? This is worse than making sure my domains aren't going to expire...

> Your Google Account contains a gift card with a monetary balance.

So, all I need to do to keep a Google Account active indefinitely is just link an unspent $10 gift card to the account? Sweet!

> Sending email notifications to your Google Account

> Sending notifications to your recovery email, if any exists

Further up it says that reading an email counts as being active.

So if you have IMAP access does that count when you simply read that email?!

I have gmail accounts with IMAP that haven’t logged into the web interface in years. I can’t be the only one in this boat. This is very ambiguous and troubling.

Before that inevitably happens, there will probably be a point we all have to switch over to identification not by user selected username but random alphanumeric ID string, with display names only for search, free from uniqueness requirements and somehow impersonation resistant. A lot of social media actually uses such ID in the backend/for internal uses(variable length primary key!? Of course not!), maybe it’s time frontend experiences think about that, too.

They say I have no right to my data since I can't log into the account, but I don't think the law works that way. I have a right to my data, they are entitled to give it to me if I can prove I am who I say I am, which I can.

You certainly don't want anything important like your retirement account to rely on something transient like your isp email, or even a paid email from some smaller company that you might forget to pay on time one year, or they just decide they don't like you for not even necessarily anything you did.

So you use gmail or hotmail etc, not because they are free, because they arre presumed to outlive everything else, and be safer because of that. And that much is completely true and not a mistake.

There are a few really bad things on a collision course here that hasn't been properly dealt with at a society/regulation level yet:

* gmail, and email in general, is not an inconsequential thing like a Spotify account, or like email when it was new and nothing important in life depended on it yet. Life-critical things depend on it now. There are many things now where your email is the ultimate way a service provider knows you. There is no office you can go to to clear up any kind of account error as an ultimate option.

* Yet, providers are allowed to TREAT it as a trivial inconsequintial thing.

* google absolutely is responsible for actively drawing people to use gmail and become dependant on gmail and other google services. It isn't good enough to say they don't make anyone, they do actively pursue it. Same goes for others not just google.

* too many consequential things are allowed accept mere email and login credentials as the only form of proof of identity without an equivalent for the ultimate option you always used to have for any possible thing: "Go down town to the credit union office and present myself and my drivers license and my birth certificate, or 20 other people from the community who all simply say "yeah that's her, I'm even the doctor who delivered her, and she's even your own siter in law so you know she was married to the house owner, so give her her house deed even though the husband died in the war last year and the town clerks office burned down and no one can produce the piece of paper now"

I don't know what I would do if betterment.com decided not to honor my login or I couldn't repond via either of the two email addresses on file. It's 2 different addresses from two different providers, but even 2 is still only 2. If one can break, two can break. So much of my life's resources all hinging on something so flimsy. This is not robust. Now multiply that by x billion other people, most of whom are not aware how fragile their access to these important things is, and how little they can do about it if they are unlucky and have a problem.

The reason I now use gmail and not hotmail is because Microsoft did a similar thing 20 years ago. When I lost my hotmail account, I thought I might as well use gmail from now on. Reason I didn't log into my hotmail account was because I used the mail address I got from the university.

Just buy a book, movie, game, or a subscription of some sort and it won't go inactive ever.

I can't help but feel that they're slowly turning into a Yahoo though, given this policy and their now terrible search results.

Time changes.

I think Google never recycles usernames due to security reasons:

https://support.google.com/mail/thread/48938290

https://twitter.com/Google/status/974054535974006784

Maybe you are suggesting that this policy is about to change?

[1] Not my primary account but I got it to give Gmail a try when it was first opened to the public. I personally found it 'meh' but kept the account for testing purposes with my own email server.

I disagree, there is a solution out there, it's just more work because the client-software has to be smarter. We can take inspiration from how our meat-space society functions, where everybody maintains their own contextual aliases as metadata, something that can be personalized or shared.

For example, imagine we have a big global commenting site, and my own metadata says "Terr_ believes ID 49985189215 is Bob Smith."

When I ask the software to contact "Bob Smith", it knows who I mean from that mapping. When I publish something for other people to see and add a special reference to Bob Smith, it contains "{49985189215 which author knows as "Bob Smith}". People who already know 49985189215 as "Bobby Smith" would see that pop up on their screen instead, and the rare few which have a conflicting "Bob Smith" would see it rendered differently, making it obvious I don't mean their Bob Smith.

It gets more complex though when you consider the same user with multiple contexts: "I'll call Bob" at home might easily be a totally different person than "I'll call Bob" in the workplace.

I would absolutely not consider a free account on anything to outlive a paid product. Quite the opposite: If I'm not paying for any kind of SLA, written in an agreement, I assume the account in question is temporary, could disappear at any moment, and treat it as such: Never rely on it for anything where you'd be screwed if you suddenly got locked out.

There have been so many, many, many, many of these "I got locked out of my free Xyz account with no appeal possible!!" stories, I'm shocked that people still rely on them. And if you say, well, you shouldn't have put your 401(k) retirement account behind that E-mail address, they call you victim blaming. People, your free account is worth what you pay for it.