How to Find Out the Exact Date You Created Your Gmail Account

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 that exact date.

Search for Gmail’s Welcome email in your inbox and see its timestamp to know when you created your Gmail account. You might have deleted that mail like many of us have. In that case, try this other method.

Click on the gear icon below your profile picture and go to Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP. Under POP Download, look for Status. If you haven’t tampered with this section at all, you’ll see this message: POP is enabled for all mail that has arrived since followed by the date you created your Gmail account. Note it down in a safe place.

If you have fiddled with the POP settings before, you’ll most likely see a blank space instead of the account creation date. This means that you’re out of options for now at least.

There was a third method floating on the web involving the creation a Google Takeout archive, but that no longer seems to work. How we wish it did!

Ah! I just found my Gmail account creation date: 7/26/2004. Quite a while ago!

— Andrew @ PAX (@coulombe) May 30, 2013

Have you ever lost your Gmail account? How did the account recovery process go? Do you know of any other method to recover the account creation date for Gmail?

Image Credit: Save the Date on a wood cube by Gustavo Frazao via Shutterstock