Hey they’re do-it-yourself technicians, a couple of weeks ago we spoke about recovering passwords and I used Facebook as an example, but I’ve had lots of people looking for a Google-specific one so that’s what we’re tackling today.
If you can’t remember the password to your Google account or gmail account, Google provides this page to give you some information on how to recover it. I’ve linked it up here.
The first link under forgot your password is: follow these steps to recover your forgotten password which will take you through to this page. There’s also a page here with some tips to help you with your account recovery.
The Google login page is empty and white and clear and lovely looking, but it does have this wonderful little button here that says “forgot password” which will take you through to a page that asks you for any recent password that you do remember.
So, if you’ve forgotten one but you remember what it might have been a week ago before you changed it or one that you had a little bit longer ago, that will help in the process of recovering the account. If however, you can’t remember any of the passwords you’ve used in the past then “try another way” is another option.
There, this next option uses a phone number that you might have registered with your Google account, which I highly recommend, but if you don’t have one registered or it’s a phone number that you no longer have then that’s not much help. Then you can click the link that says “I don’t have my phone”
The next option is for a secondary or recovery email address that you might have had registered with Google. Again a really good idea to have, but if you don’t have it, then you can click that “try another way” link.
The next option is to add the month and year that you created your Google account, which might be fairly easy if it’s something like the time you graduated or when you started a new job or something like that, but realistically a lot of people aren’t gonna remember when they created their account, but at least that’s something else that Google does know that they can confirm. So if you do have it, enter it in here, if not click the “try another way” button.
This is pretty much the end of the line as far as Google is concerned, the best you can do here is add in an email address and they’ll grab any of the information that you’ve given them so far and put it together in such a way that they can confirm that it really is you and unlock the account for you. So you provide them with another email address and they’ll use that to contact you.
If that doesn’t work for you, there’s a “try another way” button again down the bottom, but it leads you to a page that says Google couldn’t verify that you own this account, which isn’t really much help.
If you forgot the email address that you’re using for your Google account, there’s some steps hereto work out what that email address is and get you on the road to recovery.
It’s worth noting up front that all of these answers are for an @gmail.com account. If you have a Google account that is provided to you by your organization, somebody in your organization will have the authority to reset that password and you can do that much more easily.
If you’re the administrator of a Google domain and you’ve forgotten the password, well there’s other processes to go through to fix that. I’ll link them up here for you.
If you feel that somebody else might have access to your account there’s some steps down the bottom here to go through if you’ve got a hacked or hijacked account and that will step you through a separate recovery process for that.
There’s a couple of other options down the bottom of this page but they’re really only useful in very specific cases but if they help you then that’s great. The links are there.
I hope that was helpful for you. At The Tech Doctor, our mission is to help you become your own technician and navigate the technology maze. There’s some other episodes that you may not have seen here and here. Clicking the subscribe button down here will allow you to be alerted for all new videos as they come out.
We’re here to help. Thank you so much for watching. Have a great day!