How to delete your Google account

If you’re like me, you eventually end up with too many identities. I haven’t figured out how to associate different email addresses with a single account, so I have to maintain several different Google identities.

For example a client invites me to join his Google group using his company email, so I have to set up a new account to access and manage that group. At some point I try to consolidate these to use my GMail identity, but that isn’t always possible (the client may for instance have decided to restrict their group to only allow access by people using their corporate domain addresses for instance).

Eventually though, I do end up with accounts that I’m no longer using (and sometimes I just would like a fresh start). Google actually has a link in their help about deleting an account, but it took me a bit to find it, so I thought I’d post a step by step guide.First you must be logged in, so go to one of the Google pages like http://groups.google.com and look for the link at the top right corner of the page that shows you who you are logged in as:

If you see the “Sign in” link instead, just click that and log in as the user you want to delete:

Once you are sure you are logged in with the right account, click the “Account” link and you will be taken to the management page for your account:

Click on the link next to “My Products” that says “Edit” and you’ll go to the accounts page, where you can choose to remove your web history OR account:

Click the link that says “Close account and delete all services associated with it”, and you’ll get the delete account screen, which has a number of options and validate with your password. Unless you want to keep a membership in a group, check all of the boxes here, then hit the button that says “Delete Google account“:

Once you have done this, you’ll get a screen that tells you that the account has been deleted:

That’s all there is to it – you can recreate the account by following the steps from my prior post Getting a Google Login for Your Existing Email Account