Lost Gmail Account Recovery with no Phone or Alternate Email Hi everyone,
Leo Notenboom here for AskLeo.com. One of the more common questions I get has
to do with Gmail account recovery and it not working.
For whatever reason, someone has lost access to their account.
The password isn't working and they've done the basics.
They've tried to recover the password
using the tools that they have seen are available that usually involve using
an alternate email address or a phone number to get a text message.
Again, for whatever reason, the alternate email address isn't working
and the phone number isn't working, usually because they no longer have access
to that number so they can't get the code that was texted to that number.
I want to say there's a good possibility
you may not be able to get your account back.
This is very important, but I do want to give you one last straw to grasp at, that,
from what I have seen is not something
a lot of people know about or get told about in part of the process.
The place I want you to go is
https://go.askleo.com/grecovery
That is a shortcut that will take you to a specific page out at Google.
I'm using my shortcut because Google has
been known to change the URLs and I want to give you a consistent place to go to.
If it changes, I will update this particular shortcut.
So https://go.askleo.com/grecovery
and that will take you
to the beginning of the process of recovering your account.
I'm going to go ahead and enter an email address.
Now. I will say that in order to recover
the account, you need to know your email address.
That is not something that is easy to work around.
There is a forgot email link on this page and what it will do is it will ask you
for either the account recovery email or the account recovery phone number that's
been associated with your original account.
In other words,
you've got to know one of those three: the email, the account recovery email,
or the phone number that has been associated with your account.
And one of those three has to work.
If that's not the case, I don't know how to get your account back.
In most cases, people know their email address.
So let's go ahead and proceed with that.
We'll click on next.
You can see that it's now asking for the last password that you remember.
Try that.
Use one of the old passwords that you
remember that was associated with this account.
If your account was hacked, this password might be the last password
you used, the last password you know before a hacker may have changed it.
So absolutely give this one a try.
If you say next, if you do this and you say next, Google will then ask you
for more information to hopefully recover your account.
Let's assume for a moment though that this
doesn't work or that you don't have a previous password for this account.
We'll go ahead and click on Try Another way.
Now what's going to happen is that the account recovery email address that was
used with this account is now going to get an email with a code.
Your ability to retrieve that code
from that other email account is how you prove you are who you say you are.
I get it.
One of the reasons we're here is that you
may not have access to that alternate account if you have a phone number,
that will probably show up here as well when we try another way.
For example purposes, this account only has the alternate email address.
Therefore that's not going to work when we click on Try Another way.
It basically just says start over.
Google has exhausted all of the options
that it has available for you to try to recover your account.
Now in my case, this was a very short process.
There were only a couple of things that it
had available to try a previous password or a working account recovery email.
And in fact, since it was a real email, there is an email at that account
that gives me the recovery code that I could have entered here.
But as you can see, the process might not work.
If you don't have all of the information,
the process may fail to get you to recover the account.
If that happens, then the only option you have is in fact to try again.
But this will simply start the process over.
It won't give you any additional steps that you didn't already try at least once.
All I can suggest here is try harder.
Try to remember an old password that you used.
Try to guess an old password.
You don't have a lot to lose at this point.
See if you can't come up with something that satisfies the criteria that Google
will ask you here to confirm that you are indeed the rightful account holder.
Remember, what they're trying to do is prevent hackers from doing exactly this.
Hackers will try to go through the account recovery process for your account.
The more ways that they can get in,
the easier it is for them to hack your account.
Google really needs to do a good job of proving that you are who you say you are.
The way you do that is by knowing your
password or knowing your previous password.
It's by having an alternate email address
or multiple alternate email addresses set up and working it's by having an alternate
phone number associated with your account that can receive a text with a code.
If none of those are possible, you've lost your account forever.
I know of no way to get it back.
There is no magic back door.
This one link that we started with is
the only thing that I know to add to the pot to give you another option
to try that may include a few things that the normal process didn't include.
Try it if it fails if you cannot get your
account back, please learn from the experience.
Make sure you've got all that recovery
information set up in the new account that you'll have to create to replace this
one. For updates for comments for related links and more visit askleo.com/144036
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.