How to share your Google account after you die

Inevitably, we will need someone to handle our affairs—and for most people, their email account serves as the linchpin for your whole life. Bank accounts, subscriptions, utilities, and more.

The most direct method is to share the password to your email address with loved ones, like through emergency access in a password manager. But as a precaution or backup—or in case you don’t want to share all the data housed in your email account, since a Google and Apple account often have file storage attached to them—you can also set up legacy access to your email account.

Google allows this through its Inactive Account Manager. Here’s how to set it up.

Things to know about Google Inactive Account Manager

1. You can select specific information to be available to your contact, like only your Gmail data. Or you can add more Google products (e.g., Drive, Photos, Calendar, etc).
2. When the inactivity period takes effect, your contacts can only access your data for 3 months. They should download it so they can save it for later reference, if needed.
3. You will receive multiple notifications prior to access being granted to others.

Example: You stop using your Google account. After the period of delay you specified (e.g., 3 months) of full inactivity across all platforms, your designated contact(s) receive a notification with a link to a download of the data you’ve granted access to. Three months after that notification date, they lose access to the data. Your account will then be deleted, according to Google’s policy.

How to set up Inactive Account Manager

Navigate to this webpage: https://myaccount.google.com/inactive

Here, you can customize the following settings:

• Choose your contacts & data available to them: You can set up to 10 people who can access your selected data. You can edit this information later, if you need to adjust.
• Set an autoreply: You can set the message for an automatic reply sent to any incoming email after your account gets marked as inactive.
• Receive email notifications: Get periodic reminders that this feature is active.
• Period of inactivity: Choose between 3, 6, 12, or 18 months before access is granted to those you’ve designated as contacts.
• Contact information: You will be contacted multiple times before Inactive Account Manager grants your contacts access to your data. You can set a phone number, in addition to your email address and your recovery email on file.
• Automatically delete your account: If you don’t set an Inactive Account Manager contact, Google has a standard two-year deletion policy for inactive personal accounts. But you can set your account to automatically delete itself sooner.

Don’t want your account to get deleted ever?

This advice may not hold true indefinitely, as Google’s policies always change. But currently, you can buy your loved ones extra time without activating the Inactive Account Manager feature. 

You will need to take these two steps to give loved ones access and keep your account alive indefinitely:

1. Share your password in a secure manner (ideally, via a password manager).
2. Add a gift card with a balance or buy a digital item through the account—it currently guarantees your account won’t get deleted.

That said, digital data can be unsafe to allow to linger indefinitely. If you truly are no longer capable or available to manage the account, letting it get wiped eventually isn’t a bad idea.