Gmail account strangeness

I thought I set up NicksArtStuff as a gmail account a couple of years ago but ended up not using it. I decided to resurrect it so I could separate my art stuff from my personal stuff.

Gmail told me that it couldn’t find the account. Fair enough, perhaps I didn’t set it up or it was deleted after lack of use. I will create a new one except I can’t because that account name is already in use.

I appear to have chosen schrodinger’s cat’s email account that both exists and doesn’t exist at the same time. Any ideas how I can get that email address back?

You could try the account recovery process for that *username*?

Are you sure you chose the same names when creating the account? for example my email address is blahBlah@gmail.com but my username is mattsomething… they dont have to be the same thing.

At some point googlemail and Gmail accounts were merged.

Did you set up a googlemail account?

Try this discovery page:

https://accounts.google.com/signin/v2/usernamerecovery?continue=https%3A%2F%2Fmail.google.com%2Fmail%2F&service=mail&ss=1&scc=1&rm=false&osid=1&hl=en&flowName=GlifWebSignIn&flowEntry=ServiceLogin

You enter a phone number or email and it shows all accounts linked to it….

I had loads I’d forgotten about, which I then recovered and closed.

Try in just lower case.

Email addresses are not case sensitive but it could be that some check is falling foul of this little faux pah

Seems that the email account doesn’t exists when I try to send it email, just when I try to create an account with that email address.

“Your message wasn’t delivered to NicksArtStuff@gmail.com because the address couldn’t be found or is unable to receive email.”

Weird

“Your message wasn’t delivered to NicksArtStuff@gmail.com because the address couldn’t be found or is unable to receive email.”

So, it might exist but be in some state that prevents it being used.

I believe they did delete accounts for a while after a year or so of inactivity (although now stopped due to complaints)
However even when they did delete them they didnt release the name for reuse since that could have awkward security implications.
Try the approach suggested above but depending how old it is it may be lost forever.

Going to check some of my old Gmail accounts.
Delete them if I can.

I miss my old Eurosport email 🙁

why are you pissing about with this when you already own the domain “nicksartstuff.com”? You can just have whatever@nicksartstuff.com as your Gmail address. Much easier (and looks more professional). You can even transfer the domain management to Google Domains now to make everything simpler & keep it all in one place.