Last week I had one of those stupid senior moments. I use Windows Live Mail on my desktop to read all of my emails, and I kept getting a few ‘spam’ emails arriving from my Gmail account. Strangely when I investigated further by going online to try to find those same spam emails they weren’t there. I then did a foolish thing. I deleted my Gmail account. Knee jerk reaction I know caused by my brain not being in gear. BIG MISTAKE!
Why? Because that account was associated with my Picasa account, my YouTube account, my Google reader, my Google Buzz and two blogs on Blogger! I have lost them all and all the followers associated with those accounts. I tried to contact Google to ask them to reinstate my account. Sensibly they requested that I provide some proof to establish whether or not the account was actually mine. So I listed all the sites that were associated with that email address. I supplied the account password as well. They replied stating that they required more details such as the dates when I actually joined each site. Of course as someone who finds it hard to remember what day it is today, I couldn’t hope to provide this information in a million years!
Could you remember the dates that you joined each site that you are subscribed to? Could you even get close to it? Since then, I have been desperately trying to log into my YouTube account to retrieve my videos that I have stored up there, but to no avail. You see each time that I try it asks me for the associated Gmail address for my YouTube account and of course that doesn’t work anymore as its no longer available.
Nor can I ‘restart’ it using the same details. Yes its true that before I deleted it it did warn me and showed all of the sites that email address was linked to, but you know knee jerk reactions don’t you? I saw the warning but it didn’t register at the time that I would be saying my last goodbyes to all my content. My fault yes but Google, you ask the impossible of this scatter brained Granny in asking me to provide all those details and dates!
I am not the only one who considers that its a bad idea to have to need a Google email address associated with your YouTube account either. Take a look at these complaints HERE!
The answer of course is to open another Gmail account and set everything up again. Oh well, I suppose the moral of this story is think carefully before you act, don’t have a knee jerk reaction and get your brain into gear!
TG 
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