How To Properly Abandon An Account

The reason why anyone would want to abandon an account is simply because they cannot delete it. It’s becoming common (and rather annoying) that while it’s oh-so easy to sign up for something, it’s either next to impossible or flat-out impossible to delete the account.

Why would you want to delete an account?

People have varying reasons, but the most popular is to keep crap out of your email; this crap I’m referring to are usually notification messages that you really don’t care about and want gone.

Abandoning an account

If you’re faced with the situation where you cannot delete an account (like with Skype or AIM), you have to abandon it because you have no other choice. The difficulty involved in doing this depends on the account you’re trying to abandon.

1. Create a throwaway/"sign-up" email address.

You most likely already have one of these; it’s an email address that’s not your primary account but use to sign up for stuff with. If you don’t have one, you’re already well aware of the places where you can get a free email account.

2. Login to the account you want to abandon and change the email address to your throwaway.

This is usually the most difficult part of the process. Sometimes it’s very easy, but other times there are certain web service providers that absolutely bury the location of where to change an email address. Some digging around may be required.

Popular names for text links where you can change your registered address are "Preferences", "Account", "Tools" and "Settings".

Some web service providers require you to verify your newly-entered email address while others don’t. And some even require you to click verification links from both accounts just to change the registered email address.

3. Purposely blank out any public profile data the account has.

This is the part most people skip but really shouldn’t.

Should the account have a public profile, it’s in your best interest to blank it out as best you can. You’re abandoning this account, so you don’t want anyone attempting to contact you through it since you’ll never get the communication. Just about anything that has a public profile will show up in a Google search, after all.

Even if you do have the ability to delete an account, abandoning it may be easier

Everyone is familiar with that oh-so-annoying notice that says it will take "up to 2 weeks" for notifications and such to stop being delivered to your email address after you specifically instruct the whatever-it-is site not to do it.

But have you ever noticed that when you change the registered email address, it takes effect immediately?

Funny how that works.