How To Find your Email Address if you Lose or Can’t Remember it

Jamie Read more February 21, 2019

How can you find your email address if you lose or cannot remember it? How can you recover your account if you don’t remember what your email address is? While it may sound unlikely, it happens more often than you might think.

How To Find your Email Address if you Lose or Can't Remember it

As an IT tech in my other day job, I see users all the time who cannot remember their full email address. Sometimes it’s new starters or new accounts. Sometimes it’s someone who has recently married and have just changed their name and sometimes people just forget. While surprising to some, if you think of the number of email addresses, passwords and logins we juggle every day, forgetting one of them isn’t that unusual.

Your main challenge if you forget your email address is identifying your account. As many accounts will use the email address as the primary identifier, if that’s the thing you cannot remember you’re going to find it more difficult than you otherwise might.

There are two preventative measures you can use to stop this happening. One is to always set a recovery email when you set up a new account and the other is to use a password manager. Both will help should you forget your email address.

Recovery email

There is one thing you can do in advance of forgetting your email address and that is to set a backup. Usually referred to as the recovery address, this is an option on most email providers and online accounts. It allows you to provide your primary email address as login but also a backup email address in case anything happens. This is primarily in case of hacks but also serves as a reminder should you forget your main login.

You can then attempt to log into your email, fill in the ‘lost login’ part, request a login link be send to your backup email and should be able to recover your primary email address from there.

Password manager

Password managers don’t just remember passwords but email addresses, online account details, online forms and a whole lot more. If you use one whenever you log into something online, you should never actually lose your email address. You may forget it but your password manager will always have a record of it.

Recovering your email address if you lose or cannot remember it

If you don’t have access to either of those preventative measures and need access to email without the email address, your options are limited. Email security is paramount and providers go to some lengths to protect your accounts. You still have options though.

Check your browser history

If you are on the computer you last logged into your account using the email you forgot, take a look in your browser history to see if you can find the Inbox page. You will likely be prompted to log in again but in some cases, rather than asking for the entire login, it will ask for the password.

If you’re lucky you should see something like, ‘Session timed out, please re-enter the password for emailaddress@email.com’. Outlook does this has it has happened to me before. Your email address is front and center.

Use the login page

Each email providers will have a login page where you can request to recover your account. It will usually ask for the email address but will often have the option to select a phone number instead. As long as you have set up a phone number, you can use that.

Google does it, Outlook does it, Facebook does it, Twitter does it and many other online providers do it too.

When you hit the login page of any of those, you will see a prompt to enter your email address, phone number and perhaps another option too. Outlook for example allows you to log in using your Skype username. If you forget your email address, this is how you can still access your account.

Contact customer services

Your only other option if you don’t remember a username or had associated a phone number is to contact the provider. This could take a while and will be a frustrating experience but is your only option.

Most email providers will use bots as first line in web chat. After that, you will likely be sent to an operator for whom English is a second language and as much as they may want to help you and be lovely people, communication is a challenge. However, it is usually your only option from here.

Prevention really is the key. If you cannot find your email address or if you lose or cannot remember it, your options are limited to maintain account security. While it may be frustrating for you, those security procedures are there to help keep your account safe.

It makes much better sense to associate a phone number, set a recovery email and use a password manager in advance. That way, it doesn’t matter how many things you forget, there is always a way to get what you need.