Do you want to know how old is your Gmail account? Knowing the date you created your Gmail account can be really useful if you ever need to go through Gmail’s account recovery process. It’s also interesting to know how long you’ve had your Gmail account!
Here’s how your Gmail account was created.
1. Find the Welcome Email
When you first create your Gmail account, old friendly Google sends you a welcome email. The exact contents of that email have changed since the service started in beta in 2004.
To find the welcome email, go to the All Mail folder (You may need to click More to expand the folders to see it.) In the top right, hover over Pagination and click Oldest.
This will put the email you received first at the top. However, if you’ve imported non-Gmail emails from before 2004 into your inbox, the welcome email won’t be at the top. It also won’t happen if you haven’t kept all your emails.
An alternative way to find the email is to search for “welcome”, “gmail team”, “[email protected]”, or “[email protected]”.
First of all, welcome. And thank you for agreeing to help us test Gmail. By now you probably know the major ways in which Gmail differs from traditional webmail services. Searching instead of filing. One free gigabyte of storage. Messages displayed as conversations in context.
If you no longer have a welcome email, check your sent items—you may have sent an email to someone on the day you created your Gmail account.
2. Check Your POP Settings
This one is unexpected, but your POP settings may be showing the date you created your Gmail account.
To access it, click the cog icon in the top right, choose See all settings, then click Forwarding and POP/IMAP. Check out our article on what POP and IMAP mean if you’re interested.
In the POP download section, look at the status line.
However, if you ever changed your POP settings, the date you created your Gmail account will no longer be shown. It also won’t be shown if you’re using an organizational account that has its settings already configured.
3. Try Google Takeout
Google Takeout is a service that you can use to export your Google data in a variety of formats. Back when Google+ was a thing, you could export that data to find out when your Gmail account was created. However, this is no longer possible.
That said, if you don’t need an exact account creation date and are happy with a rough idea, Google Takeout may still prove useful – although it will require some manual searching.
You can export all your Google data from services like Chrome, Drive, and YouTube, and then find the oldest timestamp of activity. Again, this won’t necessarily tell you the exact date, but it can help give a ballpark.
4. Query the Google Drive API
Google provides a Drive API that developers can use to interact with Google Drive. You can query this API to find out when your Google Drive account was created. This may be the date your Gmail was created; It’s not certain, though, so don’t take it as gospel.
First, visit the Drive API using this link. It pre-populates the required fields for the query. Click Execute, then select the Google Account you want to find the creation date for. Click Allow to authorize Google API Explorer to access your account.
Back on the Drive API page, the bottom-right side of the window should be populated with API queries. Within the application/json tab, find the created time. This returns the date of creation of your Drive account in yr/mm/date format.
To remove Google API Explorer from your account when you’re done, go to your Google Account and navigate to Security > Manage third-party access > Google API Explorer > Remove access > OK.
How old is your Gmail account?
Hopefully, you have been able to find out how old your Gmail account is. If not, let’s hope Google eventually provides that information in our accounts.
If your Gmail account is out of date, you may regret the email address you chose. Fear not—you can create a new Google Account and then transfer everything over.