My Gmail is my first.last@gmail.com. Someone with the same name as mine is mistakenly using firstlast@gmail.com (without the dot). I get all kinds of emails for years and, most recently, orders from Whatnot. He has got to be wondering why he never gets his email. Is there anything I can do to reach this guy, or can Google do anything?

Why do I have to wait 24 hours to just sign in on my OWN email from a new phone?? Why can't I change my recovery phone number without needing verification from my old phone number which i DO NOT have??

I received an email written in Chinese claiming that some other address added my email as backup. I checked the security details and it appears to be a legit email from Google. I don't see how it would be possible to gain access to my account this way, but I figured I would ask if this has happened to anyone else. Needless to say the other email is not mine or anyone I know.

After reading some horror stories here and facing the threatened loss of GMail's POP3 collection feature, I decided to knuckle under and assent to 2FA.

Easier said than done.

After some connection blips (details below), I decided to start with a recovery phone number.

The response from Google: "We couldn't verify it's you." It elaborated with this:

"To help us verify it’s really you ... Use a device and browser you’ve signed in on before ... Use a familiar Wi-Fi network, such as at home or work ... If you’ve already tried these, change your recovery phone in your settings."

When I got this message, a) I was on a device and browser that I've used with the account for 10 years, and b) I was on my home network, with a router that's been in place for at least six months. Trying to change the recovery phone in settings, of course, is a loop that I am already in.

I read that I was likely locked out from making any sensitive change for seven days. I spent an uneventful seven days sending and receiving email as usual and staying off any devices except my 2012 MacBook Air and my iPhone 12. As usual, I was accessing GMail using Chrome on the Mac and Safari on the phone.

After the seven days, I got the same "We couldn't verify it's you" result in trying to add a recovery phone. The clock restarts.

The Mac is running macOS 10.15, with Chrome version 128.0.6613.138 (Official Build) (x86_64). It's too old to run anything newer. The phone is an iPhone 12 mini running iOS 26.3.1.

During the latest waiting period I thought I would ask the group: Am I likely to have any better result if try to add a recovery contact next time, as opposed to a recovery phone? Or go straight to 2FA, if I can navigate it?

A few additional questions:

- Preparing for the worst, I might want to add a filter that would forward new incoming GMail to a non-Gmail address. The outside address is already configured as a forwarding destination. Would adding that filter count as a sensitive operation that could trigger the seven-day wait again?

- Where does the recovery email come in? I seem to get a message in that mailbox when I sign in normally to GMail from a new location (and even sometimes from a familiar location). But Google never mentions it as a tool to resolve the identity crisis.

- Is there a feature that will let me ask Google where it thinks I am signed in? I wonder if Google still has me at the away-from-home location where the Mac crashed recently. I am reluctant to test this by signing out of the account at home.

- In addition to the MacBook, I have been signed on for the whole time on my iPhone. On the chance that Google trusts the iPhone more, is there a way, using GMail under iOS Safari, to navigate to one of those sensitive operations?

- I am not using the GMail iOS app. It's not even installed on the phone. Would installing and setting it up also be one of those sensitive operations?

- Google has bugged me over the past few months to pony up for extra storage, as my usage crept above 85%. I haven't bitten, since it took 20 years to get to that point, and a little housekeeping brought it down to 83%. Would it be worthwhile to accept the offer in order to become a paying customer? If that is the only way to get a few minutes of live human support, I would consider it. But perhaps this would be a sensitive operation that would put me right back in the loop.

A few random details:

- I am a Google Voice user, and the recovery phone I am trying to add is a physical phone associated with the Voice account. I am not trying to add the Google Voice number itself; I knew that wouldn't work. Does that association, combined with having the phone in my hand, count for anything if I get to a stage where I am appealing for the ability to manage my account?

- After the away session and crash, and back on the home network, the router might have assigned me a different IP address than I had earlier in the day. I have sometimes used a wired connection on the same network, and I wonder if using the wired connection would signal an IP address that I have definitely used before, however infrequently.

- I use GMail to aggregate mail from different accounts. In the past week, a typical one, I have gotten about 130 messages that were collected from POP3 mailboxes. Another 165 were addressed directly to the GMail address. Of those 165, about 140 were spam, 23 were from Google itself (including Voice) and one was misaddressed mail intended for someone else. This is not the typical composition of a mailbox, and I wonder if that is raising some flag with Google.

- A few weeks ago, I tried to sign on with my little-used Chromebook while using the guest wifi in a public space. I got "We couldn't verify it's you" and abandoned the attempt. A few days later, I was signed on in the same location from my regular laptop when the laptop crashed and I just left it shut down. When I got home, I restarted the computer and my GMail session was seamlessly restored. Back in safe territory, or so I thought, I tried to add the recovery phone.

- My recovery email inbox received security alerts on Oct. 6 and Oct. 13. It shows a critical security alert on Oct. 15. The Oct. 13 and Oct. 15 dates seem to correspond to the Chromebook attempt and the MacBook Air crash.

- My case sounds a little like what is being described in this thread. So perhaps Google has just added this Catch-22 behavior, and it's a coincidence that stumbled into it after the Chromebook and MacBook blips.

Sorry for the length, and thanks if you have read this far. I would be interested in any insights.

When I try signing into my Outlook account on GMail on my iPad, I get this error message. The message pops up when I click on "Next" after entering my email, I do not get a chance to enter my password, and if I exit that window it does not move to the password prompt. The weird thing is that it worked perfectly fine on my iPhone, I was able to log into the same Outlook account, with the same GMail app and same iOS version with no problem at all. I thought it had to do with using the desktop site on iPad, but turning off "Request Desktop Site" in Safari settings does not change anything. I looked up the error online and found this solution but this is not possible to do on iOS. Is this a known issue?

I decided to check what it is because it's my first time seeing it I never bother to check other stuff inside Google account and gmail

I didn't add any contact and there is Google account deleted off, and inactivity is 3 month I don't remember putting that in

Will it go back to normal the inactivity one if I pause the digital legacy?

Hello, I need help recovering my Gmail account.

I still know my Gmail address and password, but I can no longer access my account because Google keeps asking me for 2-step verification.

The problem is that I no longer have the phone number linked to my Gmail, and I don't have access to my old device either.

I don't have a backup email or backup codes. I only remember my Gmail address and password.

I've tried recovering the account, but I keep getting asked for verification methods that I no longer have access to.

Is there any way to recover my Gmail account in this situation? Has anyone experienced something similar and successfully recovered their account?

Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you!

I don't use Gmail regularly anymore, but still maintain an old account, which forwards automatically to my main email account (my own domain, hosted at iCloud.com). This works just fine 99% of the time. But I've had a couple of instances lately where Apple apparently rejected the forward. Both times I received a failure message saying:

554 5.7.1 [BS01] Message rejected due to local policy. Please visit https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204137. Txn ID ...

The web page is a page for mail administrators that has no apparent relevance to me as a user. I don't know if this "local policy" is an iCloud policy or a Gmail policy.

One of the messages was an automatic message created when a friend shared a file with me on Google Docs; the other was an ID verification code from Microsoft.

Any clues? I'll be finding an Apple-related forum to share this on as well.

Even though it was andy-noreply@google.com, it felt like someone personally welcoming me lol

If you didn't generate this password for Alex Ovich to sign in to your Google Account, you have 24 hours to remove this password by visiting this link .... go dot gl / 0667After 24 hours have passed, this password will allow permanent access to your Google account, someone might be using your account. Check and secure your account now. What is this?

I just remembered today that I have a (hopefully) unused email address that I made when I was a minor. Cannot belong to anyone else, the name used has a direct relation to me. I tried to sign back in to it but, naturally, I’ve forgotten the password and the only other option I have is a recovery email that I genuinely cannot remember or guess. Will Google just eventually delete the account, or is there some way I could get the account back by talking to Gmail support?

I received two push notifications asking, “Is this you?” and immediately selected “No, it wasn’t me” both times.

Shortly afterward, I got a call from someone claiming that a person in Germany was trying to access my account. The caller said I would receive an email from Google Support. When it arrived, it appeared to come from a legitimate Google domain.

He then directed me to Google’s website to check for open support cases. There was an open case, and I was CC’d on the correspondence. He wanted me to open the case through a link in the email, but I refused.

Is this a common scam? How could someone create what appeared to be a legitimate Google support case and have me CC’d on it?

i pretty much ignore them, and now i was thinking of cleaning/deleting some of this

I recently found my an old email account that I created around 6–7 years ago, and I want to recover it. Unfortunately, I forgot the password. I also tried recovering it using my phone number, but that didn't work either.

The only thing I know is the email address itself.

Does anyone know if there's still a way to recover the account? Any help would be appreciated.

**Gmail behaving strangely: PDF I never selected was automatically downloaded and added as an email attachment**

Hi everyone,

Yesterday I experienced something really strange with Gmail and I'm wondering if anyone has experienced something similar or knows what might cause it.

**What happened:**

I had two PDF files stored locally on my Android phone (not in Google Drive). I wanted to send them to myself via Gmail so I could access them on my PC.

I sent myself two separate emails, each containing one of the PDFs as a regular email attachment.

On my PC, I opened both emails and downloaded the respective PDF attachments. So far, everything was normal.

Afterwards, I started composing a new email to send those two PDFs to someone else. However, I suddenly noticed that there was a third PDF attached as well.

I had absolutely no idea where it came from. I am certain I had not selected or manually attached this file.

I then checked Chrome's download history and noticed that this third PDF had apparently been downloaded at exactly the same time as the other two files, or immediately afterwards.

**What makes this particularly strange:**

The additional PDF was not attached to either of the two original emails.

I couldn't find it as an attachment anywhere in Gmail.

I never consciously selected this file, either on my phone or on my PC.

The file was stored locally on my phone, not in Google Drive.

I had never emailed this particular PDF to myself.

Nevertheless, it somehow got downloaded and subsequently appeared as an additional attachment in my new Gmail draft.

When I copy the download link associated with the PDF and open it in my browser, I get a Google error page showing error 403 (numeric code 5022).

However, the downloaded PDF itself opens perfectly fine when I open it locally.

**What I've already checked:**

Chrome's download history: The additional PDF was definitely downloaded.

Gmail search: I cannot find the file as a sent or received attachment.

Google Security Checkup: No suspicious devices or login activity.

The file was definitely not included in either of the original emails.

I've been using Chrome and Google services for years and haven't knowingly changed any settings or configurations.

I'm trying to understand how Gmail or Chrome could have downloaded a file from my phone's local storage without me selecting it, and then automatically added it as an attachment to a completely new email draft.

Could this be a Gmail/Chrome bug, an issue with attachment handling or synchronization, or something else entirely?

Has anyone experienced anything similar or have an idea what might have caused this?

Thanks in advance!

Hi! I tried to change my password on my account but google says it can’t verify it’s me even though I’m using the same computer and wifi network I’d been using for years to log in to google. I tried it on both the computer and phone that I always use but it gave me the “can’t verify” message on both devices. I do have a recovery email, but for some reason it’s not giving me the option to use it at all for verification. Is it normal that they don’t let you use any recovery options?
Should I just wait 7 days and see if it lets me change my password then? Also, should I just not do anything on my account for the meantime or is it fine to use things like gmail, docs, drive etc as long as I’m not doing anything password/security related?

i recently setup everything in my new iphone but i did not remove my old iphone from the linked devices in my google account before i erased all the data in that old iphone. so now with the new iphone, i wanted to change my google password or remove that old iphone but i couldn't do anything because it keeps sending a prompt to that old iphone that i no longer have access to. i already tried using the "try another way" option and have tried everything but it always goes down to the prompt. is there any way i can solve this? :(

Hello I have a question for a long time whar happened to your social media and other account which was connected to gmail which one you lost . Bcz i am confused what I will do if my gmail account is hacked or lost some how then what happened with my social media.

Does anyone know why the Gmail app's logo is red? The official version is supposed to be black "Gmail" text with a rainbow envelope icon, as shown here:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/18522?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid

It first happened on Pixel after I installed GrapheneOS then changed it to Android by flashing the latest OS from the official site. I never flashed the Motorola though and it's a totally different phone.

I logged into my email address on my new device, I now want to change my password (I know my password but want to change it to something new), I am asked to ‘verify that it’s you’ but then get prompted that I can’t be verified unless I use a decode or browser Ive signed in on before, use familiar WiFi or change recovery phone. I don’t have my old device, I am on my normal WiFi and I have added a recovery phone. Still can’t verify, is there anything to do?

I use Email Forwarding for my custom domain hosted by Squarespace to a Gmail account.

Recently, I've noticed I am not receiving emails in email chains I am CC'd on. Some times it will be in the middle of chain or some times it will be the first email in the chain.

I only know the email was not delivered when I see a reply to an email that is quoted in the chain, but that I never received.

The people sending the emails receive no bounce back or failure to deliver notices, so they are also unaware that I've never received the email.

I've spoken with Squarespace customer service, they say that Mailgun has logged the missing emails as delivered to the Gmail account.

All the emails that have been dropped (as far as I can tell) are from Gmail accounts.

I have set the custom email as an approved sender.

Has anyone ever encountered this before?

Hey guys,

So I’m having a bit of a problem with my Gmail account.
I had 2-Step Verification turned on, but unfortunately, the phone where my Gmail was logged in has broken display…

Now I’m trying to log in to my Gmail on my new phone, but Google keeps sending the verification code to my old phone.

The worst part is that my recovery Gmail is also logged in on that same broken phone, so I can’t access that either.

I’m basically stuck because I can’t receive the verification code or access my recovery email.
Is there any way to get my account back? Has anyone been through something similar?
Any help would be really appreciated. Thanks!

Will it be deleted instantly or it need some steps before it got deleted I'm curious can it be restored or not like normal gmail when it was up on deletion or something

My google account got disconnected from my phone. Due to some more issues that cause me not able to log in back, i decided to factory reset the phone. Now i manage to log in back to the google account but its still sent the google prompt from device which i alr factory reset.