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I created two accounts for my little kids to act as memoirs repositories and in theory nobody will need to access the accounts for the next 18 years or so. The idea is just to send cool stuff there and give them access once they grow up (assuming Gmail will still exist).

If I configure my personal main Gmail account to get mail from those 2 accounts via POP3, will that be enough to prevent Google from disabling them due to inactivity?

Put in another way, is a POP3 account login equivalent to a web Gmail login (as far as this question is concerned)?

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    Welcome to Web Applications Stack Exchange! I edited the title of your question into what I thought was a better description of the problem. Please comment here if you feel the meaning has been lost. Great question, by the way. – Vidar S. Ramdal Mar 8 '14 at 1:58
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Google's Program Policies page says "Google may terminate your account in accordance with the terms of service if you fail to login to your account for a period of nine months." That's "may," not "will," and it doesn't answer whether POP3 access counts as "active."

But you can use Google's Inactive Account Manager to set up alerts for inactivity. You can also set it to grant someone access to download some or all of the account's data if the alert goes unheeded.

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  • I did read the policy, hence this question. I didn't know about the inactivity monitor, very useful! – chris Mar 9 '14 at 23:42

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