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Comment by cobertos | Hacker News Reader

Wish you could check your inactivity status more closely than their suggested "if you're not sure, just sign in to the Google account". I have a couple Google accounts that are just pulling email to a separate mailbox and who knows if that's active or not. Maybe I'll have to buy something on one of those accounts just to get it exempt?

Also reading this closely there's separate timers per product? This is worse than making sure my domains aren't going to expire...

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Exactly. You can buy a $1.99 movie on your Google account and that stops expiry indefinitely.

As much as I hate to feed the machine, having a financial transaction on the record definitely feels like the most approachable way to stay flagged as active.

Solid suggestion. Of course, capricious Google could always change their mind tomorrow, but it is something actionable.

> I have a couple Google accounts that are just pulling email to a separate mailbox and who knows if that's active or not.

Probably not. I think the point is to ensure there's human interaction. Don't expect any automated activity to affect the timer.

I didn't realize that. So if I have Mozilla Thunderbird running on a computer fetching emails from an account, it isn't good enough?

> Reading or sending an email

I would need to actually mark incoming emails as read?

I mean, this is just my guess; I could be wrong. But the vibe I get is that you basically have to do something non-trivial via the web (log in, create something, delete something, whatever) to show that a human is paying attention to the account and not just an automated system. Don't rely on automated means like IMAP, regardless of what actions you're performing with those.

I assume it’s tied to logging in or using the account while logged in. Email is a separate system, it’s possible they linked up the email system to the accounts system, but the easiest way to implement this would just be to update a timestamp every time someone logs in or makes an authenticated browser request.

Welp, back to Firefox containers it is then.

For those who don't know, you can have multiple Google sessions in different Firefox containers in a single Firefox profile/window.

This is an official Firefox adding as far as I know. It works with Firefox sync for me (not enabled by default).

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

> but the easiest way to implement this would just be to update a timestamp every time someone logs in

You don't have to speculate here. They clearly say "Activity might include these actions you take when you sign in or while you’re signed: Reading or sending an email, Using Google Search, etc."

So it's not just "did they log in".

> Probably not.

100% not. I have a bunch of Google Accounts (not even with a Gmail inbox attached) that just forward on email alerts from Google Ads, etc. And have been getting these update emails since July 14th.

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