How To Find The Exact Date You Created Your Gmail Account
Checking your google account creation date
If your Google account ever gets hacked or if you are unable to get into your Gmail account because you no longer have access to your mobile phone number or alternate email address, Google will require you to answer a few security questions before restoring your account.
These questions include:
- What was the last password you used to sign-in to your Google Account?
- When was the last time you were able to sign in to your Google Account?
- When did you create your Google Account?
All these questions are required and if you are not sure about the exact dates, Google says that you can provide your “best estimate.”
It is therefore recommended that you make a note of Google account creation date at a safe place but where you do get this information from? One option is that you open your Gmail mailbox, switch to All messages and note the timestamp of the welcome message from Gmail.
Do you want to know how old your Gmail account is? Knowing the date you created your Gmail account can come in really handy if you ever have to go through Gmail’s account recovery process.
Here's how to find the exact date your Gmail account was created.
1. Find The Welcome Email
When you first create your Gmail account, friendly old Google sends you a welcome email. The exact contents of that email have changed since the service began beta in 2004.
To find it, go to the All Mail folder. In the top right, hover the pagination information and click Oldest. This will put the email you first received at the top. However, if you imported non-Gmail emails into your inbox from before 2004, the welcome email won't be at the top. It also won't be there if you haven't kept all your emails.
An alternative method to find the email is to search for "welcome", "Gmail team", "[email protected]", or "[email protected]".
2. Check Your POP Settings
This is an unexpected one, but your POP settings might show the date you created your Gmail account.
To access this, click the cog icon in the top right, select See all settings, then click Forwarding and POP/IMAP. See our article on what POP and IMAP mean if you're interested.
Within the POP download section, look on the Status line. If you're lucky, you'll see the following:
1. Status: POP is enabled for all mail that has arrived since [DATE]
However, if you have ever changed your POP settings, or you're using an organizational account that may have preconfigured the setting, the date won't be shown.
3. Try Google Takeout
Google Takeout is a service you can use to export your Google data into various formats. Back when Google+ was a thing, you could export that data to discover when your Gmail account was made. However, that's no longer possible.
That said, if you don't need an exact account creation date and are happy with a rough idea, Google Takeout might still prove useful though it will require some manual searching.
You can export all of your Google data, from services like Chrome, Drive, and YouTube, and then find the earliest timestamp of activity. Again, this won't necessarily give you the exact date, but it can give a ballpark.
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