Find Old Accounts (Part 2)

[This is a multi-part series. Start here.]

In our quest to clean up and secure our long-forgotten online accounts, we’ve already covered the easy stuff. If you’re already using a password manager, you already have a list of all your accounts. And as we said in the previous article, if you’re not yet using a password manager, now is a fantastic time to start.

But even your password manager may not have your really old or obscure accounts in them. So today I’m going to give you a bunch of interesting ways to find the accounts that you’ve forgotten you even had. Some of these methods are pretty clever (and I didn’t invent them – I just collected them in one spot).

Sign in with…

Many sites offer the ability to ‘sign in with’ using some other account, such as Google or Facebook – sometimes called a ‘social login’. This is basically a third party who vouches for you and saves you from having to create a separate account for every site you visit, using a ‘single sign-on‘ technology called OAuth. But I’m here to tell you… you should avoid doing this because it gives Google and Facebook a ton of information they have no business having. You should have a dedicated account for every site, with different passwords (and even different email addresses). I will probably need to write a whole article on how to sever the link between these accounts and the “OAuth provider” (Google, Facebook, etc).

BUT… for the purposes of this series of articles, you can use the fact that you’ve used ‘sign in with’ to further flesh out your list of personal accounts. You can go to each OAuth provider and list all the ‘apps’ (sites) that you’ve authorized them to manage for you. I would put a star by these accounts so that you can eventually return to them and cut the ties that bind (your data).

To view all the accounts associated with these OAuth providers, click the links below. And I would check each and every one of these even if you don’t think you’ve linked any accounts. You may be surprised.

• Google
• Facebook/Meta
• Twitter/X
• Amazon
• Microsoft
• Apple

Search Emails

Whenever you sign up for an online account, you almost always have to give them an email address. Therefore, you almost surely have at least one “welcome” or “registration confirmation” email for each of your accounts. (This is another reason why securing your email accounts is important. There is a lot of information stored there that could be exploited by bad guys.)

To do this properly, you’re going to need to access all your email accounts. This brings up a bit of a chicken-and-egg dilemma. You need to know your email accounts in order to find your other accounts. But think back to every email address you’ve had… AOL, Prodigy, Earthlink, Hotmail, Yahoo, Mindspring, MSN, etc. Try to log in. If you fail, try using the “account recovery” or “forgot my ID/password” links to recover your access to these accounts. If that fails, you may be able to contact customer support for help.

Once you get into these accounts, you’re going to want to search through your emails for registration confirmations. Try searching your emails for the following terms. Use quotes for multi-word searches. When you find an account creation email, you might want to make a note of where the confirmation email was found and what the date was. You might actually need these emails to get access to these old accounts.

• registration or “your registration”
• welcome
• confirm
• account or “your account”
• activate
• “confirm your email”
• “verify your email”
• “password reset”

To limit the search results, you might try to restrict your search to the subject or title of the email. You can usually do this by prefacing your search term with “subject:” (like “subject: welcome”). And if you use quotes, you can search on a specific multi-word phrase. You might want to specifically search your Junk, Spam and Archived folders – they may not be included in regular searches.

The Kitchen Sink

I’ve collected an assortment of other ideas for finding old accounts. Pace yourself here – you don’t have to do all of this at once.

1. Search for user names. Before online accounts used email addresses, they had us create user ID’s. Most of us adopted ‘handles’ that we used for setting up our accounts like “coolgrrrrl” or some other weird name that you hoped wasn’t already taken. If you had some go-to user names, search your old emails for these terms.
2. Apple Keychain. Apple has some built-in tools for remembering account info, sorta like a password manager. Search for “Keychain Access” on your Mac or Settings > Passwords on your iPhone or iPad. See what’s there.
3. Android Passwords. Similar to Apple, you may have used Android’s built-in password manager. Search Settings for “password” and see if there are any accounts saved.
4. Account recovery. If you think you might have had an account somewhere, go to the site and try to log in. If you know the user ID or email you used, you can use “forgot my password” to reset it. If you don’t know the email or user ID, look for “forgot username” and make some guesses. They will probably send you a recovery link to whatever email address you used to set up the account.
5. Check App Store. Look around in the Apple, Google or Microsoft app store for apps you’ve purchased. Some apps require an account to be set up or at least an email. This could mean that they have saved data about you.
6. Check apps for linked accounts. Some apps or services that we use have the ability to link to other accounts. Some examples are below. You’ll want to log into these accounts and try to find “linked apps” or “linked accounts” in your settings/profile.
   • Cloud storage (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, Box)
   • Gaming (Discord, Steam, Twitch, etc)
   • Payment services (eBay, PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay)
   • Fitness apps (Strava, Fitbit, Peloton, Garmin)
   • Business/travel (Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, LinkedIn, TripIt, airlines, hotels, Uber/Lyft)
7. Old devices. If you have any old computers, phones, tablets, personal assistants (like Palm Pilot, Blackberry, etc) and you can still power them up, you may find clues about old accounts on them.
8. Have I Been Pwned. Troy Hunt’s amazingly useful site, haveibeenpwned.com, has been compiling an exhaustive list of data breaches for years (I’ve interviewed him a couple times). Enter your email addresses to search for any accounts associated with server hacks. If you find any, you should probably change the associated passwords, but we’ll discuss that in the next article.

Next Steps

At this point, we have our list of online accounts. Now what? In the next article, we’ll decide what to do with these accounts. We’ll secure them, remove or obfuscate the data that’s there, and maybe even delete them. You don’t have to wait till you have a complete list of accounts before moving on to the next step.