Readers to the rescue

Question : Readers to the rescue

The husband of a friend of mine has died and his widow wishes to access his email account, which is with Gmail, but she has neither the username nor the password. Is there any way of obtaining these? All I can think of at the moment is that she will have to uninstall Chrome then reinstall it and set up a new account in her name, but in doing this she will lose any existing unread emails in the original account. Can anyone help?


Solution : Readers to the rescue

Firstly, although both created by Google, Gmail has nothing to do with Chrome, which is a browser (like Internet Explorer). So there’s no need to uninstall Chrome. And Gmail can be used inside any browser. I use it in Internet Explorer, but you can, of course, use it in Chrome.

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If she has access to the computer her husband used, then open up each browser on the computer and see if it is already logged into Gmail (you can leave yourself logged into Gmail within a browser). So, if he used Chrome he may have left himself logged into Gmail. If it is logged in to then at least you will have the Gmail address, and that is a start. If not, contact some of his friends: if he has ever sent them an email, they will have his email address. Once you have the address that is a start, and you may be able to get his password from somewhere (Google, for example).

I suppose this is a reminder to all of us to write an ‘electronic’ will showing the family how to access your important computer-based systems such as email, Facebook and so on, when you should die.