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I'm looking to recover the username from a Google Account that I deleted a couple years ago.

The username is "stevenheidel". All I want is the name, don't require any information from the account. This is the username I use for everything, so it'd be great if I could have the @gmail.com address back.

Any help is appreciated, thanks!

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2  
Have you contacted Google? – ChrisF♦ Feb 18 '11 at 22:22
Good luck with that. Customer support is not a strong point of Google. – Andris Feb 18 '11 at 23:43
@Andris - Customer support is a strong point. Google is really great at providing documentation for just about everything, evidenced by your answer linking to the policy of not re-creating the email address to thwart malicious users. +1 for that answer, BTW. :) – jmort253 Feb 20 '11 at 0:58
This is why I never delete anything :( Of course, that has it's challenges too. You could try stevenheidel1@gmail.com perhaps. Also, just curious, why did you delete it in the first place? – jmort253 Feb 20 '11 at 1:00
I deleted it because this was way back when before there was spam filtering, and I was getting way too much spam. – stevenheidel Dec 27 '11 at 22:02

2 Answers

up vote 5 down vote

Unfortunately Google has a policy against reissuing deleted email addresses.
It makes sense since they can not verify if the user who wants to register a deleted email address is the original owner of that address or not. If they would allow this a malicious user could pretend to be the original owner by using his old email address.

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In fact, when you delete a Gmail account, you can still recover your gmail username with the google account you used to create it, else it is lost forever. Indeed, for security purpose a deleted username is locked to prevent a malicious impersonation or website account theft on other websites linked to the old gmail account.

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