This is everything you need to know about Gmail deleting email addresses.
Hey there, I’m Jillian Kendrick and welcome to the Momentum Marketing podcast. I’m a mama, a wife, an entrepreneur and a three time best selling co-author. In each episode you’ll get real world practical advice and strategies and maybe a parenting tip or two along the way. If you’re ready to create a business that supports your family and your lifestyle, then you’re in the right place.
Hey, there, it’s Jillian, your host for the Momentum Marketing Podcast. I hope you’re having an amazing day and a great week. How was your Thanksgiving? How was it? Mine was actually really beautiful. We had family together. We all went to my aunt’s house like it was kind of like a potluck. Like everybody brought a few dishes and which is so nice because then the entirety of the cooking isn’t on one person. So that was really great. Our son got to play with his little cousins that he loves so much and they’re getting to that age 2.5 and 3.5 years old where they’re actually starting to like play together and be nice to each other rather than just pushing each other or not caring that the other one exists. So that’s been really fun as a parent to watch the kiddos interact. Yeah, but our Thanksgiving was really lovely. How was yours?
I ran a really successful Black Friday promotion and I’m going to be doing a Black Friday debrief probably on next week’s episode. But right now, I would normally have done it for this episode obviously because like we just got done with Black Friday, we just got done with Cyber Monday. But what I’m about to talk to you today with Google deleting Gmail accounts. This is so important and it’s happening in just a couple of days and you need to be aware of it, you need to be aware of it as a consumer as somebody who might use Gmail and you need to be aware of it as an entrepreneur or business owner, because people who are on your list or email addresses that are on your list might be affected by this.
So the number one thing that you need to know and there are several articles out there about this happening is that as of December 1st, or beginning December 1st and it’s gonna continue to happen, I believe is Google will be deleting inactive Gmail accounts. So like if you have a Gmail account and you’re actually using it and by using it, I mean, logging, in receiving emails, sending emails, et cetera. I don’t believe that they’re gonna delete your account. I believe what they’re going after is inactive accounts, accounts that have been inactive for certain extended periods of time. And Google is saying that if your account has not been used, so hasn’t been logged into, hasn’t sent emails, if it hasn’t been used within a two year period Google considers your account inactive. Considering the nature of the use of accounts and the way in which spammers and spoofers and, and bad people on the internet are using old accounts. If it were me and I had any say at Google, I would bump that up to a year. I would even bump that up to 10 months, nine months, six months, maybe just to protect myself and, and really like think about it as a company and yes, Google makes bazillions of dollars, right? But as a company in order for them to maintain inactive accounts, to have those accounts on their servers, to take up space on their servers, to utilize resources and man hours to manage or even block spoofing and do any kind of clean up that might be necessary for managing or maintaining these inactive accounts. I’m sure that it’s a lot for them and not only is that a lot of utilized resources that could be put into other things, but think about the fact that if a spammer or a spoofer or somebody else is doing something with that email address and then that stuff gets on Google servers and obviously I’m sure that they have tons and tons of amazing security. But if that stuff gets into the layers of the security and gets on Google servers, what can happen? Like it can affect all of us who use not only Gmail as like a Gmail account, but plenty of people, myself included, use the Google suite to host our own email accounts and all of that could be effective. So let me make something really clear when I say that Google is going to be deleting Gmail accounts. I’m not talking about if you use the Google Business Suite and you pay for like, like for instance, I have Jilliankendrick.com, that’s my domain and any of the email addresses that I have, I pay, I don’t know, five or six bucks a month per email address through Google for Google to be my email service provider. So when my team and I log into our email addresses, we go to Google. So I’m not talking about those email addresses. I’m talking specifically about free @Gmail.com accounts. So if you have HappyDaisiesButterflies1667@Gmail.com that you created, you know, when you were 15 years old, that is not my email address. I just made that up. But if you have an email address like that, that you created, you know, however many years ago and you don’t use it, you haven’t opened it, you’re not planning on using it. And you haven’t logged in or sent an email from that account in at least two years. Gmail is going to flag that email account as inactive and they’re gonna be deleted as of December 1st. So a couple of days from now, if you’re listening to this on the day that our podcasts normally come out, which should be Tuesday, November 28th, 2023. This is gonna happen come Friday. And sure it might take a, I don’t, I don’t know that it will be. Well, Google hasn’t necessarily come out and said whether or not it’s going to be like an instantaneous complete wipe or if this is gonna be a roll out over time, all of the articles that I’ve read have said they will start deleting inactive accounts as of December 1st. So that kind of implies that they’re going to start on December 1st, a couple days from now, and then continue to do it long term. So, I don’t know again. Is that an instantaneous deletion? Is that a slow roll out? Are they saying start deleting because they mean they’re going to continue to monitor these long term? I don’t know 100% what that means exactly. But you need to be aware of it for two reasons.
Number one, if you have old inactive Gmail accounts that you haven’t logged into, haven’t sent an email from in two years, those are gonna go away like they’re gone, they’re deleted. That’s particularly important for me as a consumer and as a parent because I don’t know if I’ve ever shared this with you before, but I am not the kind of mom that does a baby book. Like I’ve tried, I, I’m pretty crafty. I’m pretty creative. Like, I love having a creative outlet. I really like sewing and I’ve made like bags and shirts and, and have done some other projects and stuff. But I’m not like crafty. Like, I, I’m very envious of like the Pinterest moms that can just take something, can take like scraps of paper and make something really beautiful out of it. Like that’s not really me. And so when my son was born, the idea of making a baby book just felt really daunting. It felt, it felt more obligatory than it did pleasurable. So I thought, ok, I don’t wanna miss out on a decade or two from now, sharing these memories with my son and letting him know about his early years of life. But I also don’t want to feel the obligation of having to sit down and once a week or once a month or whenever writing things in this book. I just, that’s not me and I’m not, I don’t want to make like, make a scrapbook out of it or do anything like that. And so I thought, what would be a great way for me and my personality and what I like to do, like, how can I still provide this information to my son without going like the traditional baby book route? And I thought, wouldn’t it be so cool if I created an email account for him? And that every once in a while, whenever I feel excited about it or whenever he does something new, wouldn’t it be fun if I could then email him an update about his young life. And then when he turns, I don’t know, 18,21, 25 something like that. He can get access to this email account and read all about his life as a little kid. So that’s what I’ve done. But I don’t regularly log into that email account because like I, I send the emails to it. I know it’s in there. I don’t have to log in but now because of the changes that Google is making to Gmail accounts, I actually do, I do have to log in. So I’ve set a calendar reminder for myself. an overly cautious calendar reminder every six months to log into his Gmail account. Look at an email, then mark it as unread and hopefully I’m good to go from there. I’m very hopeful that Google will come out with more detailed parameters on what it will take to maintain email addresses because like for this reason, exactly, I don’t wanna have to log in to his email account all the time or I don’t wanna have to have some of those emails be read by me just to maintain his account necessarily. So we’ll see over time what they decide to do.
The second reason you need to know about this is as an entrepreneur, if you have a marketing list and if you’re a business owner, if you’re an entrepreneur, you should have an email marketing list, you need to be aware so that you don’t try sending emails to Gmail accounts that have been deleted because here’s what’s gonna happen. So when it comes to our email deliverability reputation, which yes, it actually exists. Every email service provider. So Microsoft Yahoo Gmail, et cetera, they all have their own parameters and credentials and filters, so to speak. As to what as to what activities equal, good and responsible email deliverability, health and what activities equate to bad email deliverability and health. Unfortunately, they’re all pretty vague. It’s like it’s like Facebook giving up its ads algorithm, right? Like it’s not gonna happen, but there are a few things that we do know. And one of the things that we know is that the email service providers are aware of how much email activity that you’re producing. They’re aware of how many emails you’re sending and they’re especially aware because it’s, it’s their job to review your email deliverability reputation and make a determination based on those factors as to whether or not your email deserves to land in someone’s inbox or promotional folder or spam folder or to just completely be deleted and obliterated and not even make it into their servers at all. Right. It’s like, it’s like going up to the gates of the castle knocking on the door and, and someone asking, what’s your business here? Why do you want to come into our castle, into our village? And then you have to explain yourself. You have to tell them what your intentions are, why you’re there to do business or talk to the king or you know, whatever that might be, the email service providers are the gatekeepers of their users’ inboxes. Does that make sense? It’s their job to look at your sending reputation as, as a business as an email sender and determine whether the things that you do, the actions that you take and the practices that you maintain are considered good or bad and then choose to deliver or not deliver that email and where to deliver that email based on multiple factors or their own algorithm. So if you are not following good email practices, your email will not make it into the inbox. It might even not make it into the spam folder. This is why email deliverability and your email reputation is so important. It’s especially important when you use something like a CRM. It doesn’t matter whether you use Keap, Active Campaign, Go High Level, Hijabi, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Hubspot, Convertkit. It literally doesn’t matter which one you use. Here’s the way that all of these CRM’s work when it comes to email reputations. These CRM’s or these email senders, they all have servers or even some of them have multiple servers, in which of multiple servers that then aggregate the emails that you wanna send out and then send out those emails. And because multiple users of these CRM’s or email providers are on the same servers, I could be doing really, really, really good clean email practices. But then another user of that same product, that same software could be using very bad, very detrimental email practices, possibly knowing or even not knowing it. And then what happens is not only does it ruin their email reputation, but it also hurts that server’s email reputation, which then can affect my email reputation even when I’m doing the right things. So it’s important to have good quality clean email sending practices, because it affects all of us together when we’re using CRM’s and sending from the same multiple servers.
So how does this affect you as a business owner with all of these Gmail accounts being shut down? Well, here’s what it is. If you have email addresses on your list, that Gmail has gone ahead and, and deleted, they’ve determined that like this email address was used for spamming or it was used for spoofing or it was used by bots or it hasn’t been logged into in two years or more and they delete that email address, but that email address is still on your list and you attempt to send emails to that email address. Now, if you try to send emails to them a couple of times, it will probably be fine. But if you are like a lot of entrepreneurs who send emails every single day and you send multiple emails and so you start to send over and over and over again to email addresses that are no good or have been deleted and the email service providers see that. Well, they’re gonna flag you because you’re not cleaning your list. You’re not maintaining good email reputation health. You’re not doing your due diligence as an entrepreneur and as the owner of that data, pause for dramatic effect. If you’re not doing your due diligence as the owner and protector and caretaker of that personal data of those email addresses, then Google or Yahoo or the email service providers are gonna look at your behavior and say, man, what are they doing? If they don’t even know that this person, this email address no longer exists? Like we’re not gonna let their emails get in because they’re not following best practices. They’re not doing what we need them to do, right? So therein lies the question. Ok. How do we even know? And how can we tell whether or not an email has been deleted by Gmail? Well, there’s a couple of ways.
So, number one, if somebody hasn’t opened your emails in a long time and by long, I’m not talking two years, I’m talking like three months or more. If someone hasn’t opened an email from you in three months or more, that is one red flag that you should maybe get that person off of your list because they’re not paying attention to you and they’re not engaging with you. If that person hasn’t clicked on one of your emails in a couple of weeks, maybe a month or longer, there’s another red flag, they’re not engaging with you. They’re not taking action. You might wanna kick them off your list. If those emails are hard bouncing back. Meaning, meaning the email service provider’s gatekeeper is saying, hey, that email address doesn’t even exist, I can’t deliver that email. So it’s bouncing back. That’s another red flag. And the last way that you can check whether or not the Gmail addresses that you have are valid and are being used and haven’t been deleted yet is to use a program called Klean13, www.klean13.com. I unfortunately am not an affiliate of theirs. I wish I was because I would get a butt load of money from, but they’re actually pretty great. You can take your list of email addresses, you can upload it into Klean13. It will clean those email addresses it will look at. Are they valid? Are they legitimate? Have they been used by bots? Have they been logged into? Are they active? Are they inactive? Have they bounced? Like it can show you a whole lot of stuff. That’s really, really great and so important. It’s, I at least every six months will go ahead and upload my list into Klean13. Even though I’m regularly deleting people and kicking people off of my list. And hey, if you don’t engage with me, like that’s totally fine. No hard feelings, you can come back at any time. But I wanna maintain a really clean list so that my email reputation is absolutely as good as it can possibly be. Because if we end up with bad email reputations, the email service providers, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, et cetera can eventually say, hey, we don’t like what this person is doing. We’re not gonna let any of their emails come into our servers, period. Like they can shut you down. They have the power to do that. So it’s on you as the entrepreneur to maintain your list, to practice good clean list health, to practice good quality email, sending health and to maintain your email sending reputation. That’s on you. It’s not, it’s not your CRM’s fault or your email service providers fault when your emails can’t get into the inbox. That’s on you as the sender of emails. And there are multiple factors, your subject line, the words within your email, the ratio of images to words inside of the body of the email and so many other things that play a factor in whether or not your emails show up in people’s inboxes. We’re also gonna be talking about this in a later podcast episode. So make sure that you stay tuned. All of the email service providers are now requiring DKIM, SPF and DMARC. And we’re gonna go over all of that because starting January 1st and the deadline is February 1st. If you don’t have those set up for your email accounts, you will not be able to send emails ever again. And they’re not joking. This is serious, serious stuff. I’m gonna have a whole podcast episode, some solutions for you. I’ll tell you exactly what to do, how to do it. We’ll work through it together. Like, don’t worry, but be aware that this is coming and that is very, very serious. So utilize best email practices. Make sure that you’re cleaning your list, use a program like Klean 13 or any others. It doesn’t really matter what email scrubbing service you use. I don’t personally care. Just make sure that you’re using one and maintain your list health. It’s so, so important.
Thank you so much for being here with me and I’ll see you on the next episode.
Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of the Momentum Marketing podcast. If listening to this has brought you value, improved your life or given you insight on how you can build your own momentum, then please share this with a friend. And if you’re ready to grow your business on autopilot, then I want to help you get there easier and faster with a free copy of my entrepreneur’s survival kit. Just leave a review of this podcast wherever you’re listening right now. Hopefully, it’s a five star review and you love it, then screenshot the review and email the screenshot to hello@jilliankendrick.com Once we confirm the review, we’ll send you a copy of the survival kit totally free. Thank you so much for joining me and I’ll see you on the next episode. All content is written and recorded by Jillian Kendrick Copyright 2023. All rights reserved.
The Momentum Marketing Podcast
By Jillian Kendrick
Episode: #42
Topic: Gmail is deleting email addresses
Contact: hello@jilliankendrick.com
Follow IG: instagram.com/automatedmama
https://jilliankendrick.com/link-pineapple/
