If I change my Google e-mail from Gmail to an external e-mail, will all my content and apps be preserved?

Question

I have a Google account that I use with many of Google's services, including Maps, Books, search history, YouTube, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Photos, etc. Google DNS, Google Cloud Platform, Google APIs, etc. and several others. But the e-mail I have associated with that account (as the account name) is not one that I use, or would like to use, and I would like to keep all the services as they are, and simply associate a different e-mail with all of them.

I gather, from the instructions provided by Google that this is possible to do by simply deleting Gmail from my account, and supplying the desired e-mail when prompted; but I want to be absolutely sure that I'm understanding what happens when I do this, so I'd like to hear from people who have actually accomplished this that it works. Specifically:

1. If I delete my Gmail account, what happens next. Will I just be asked to supply an existing e-mail as a replacement?
2. Will all of my existing content and accounts (all of those above, search history, bookmarks, etc.) associated with the deleted Gmail account be preserved and simply now be associated with the newly supplied e-mail account?
3. Will links that I shared from the old e-mail (e.g. to Docs) continue to work?
4. What will happen to cached or downloaded content associated with mobile apps (e.g. Photos or Docs on iOS)? Will these simply be reassigned to the new e-mail or will they need to be re-downloaded?

In short, I want to be sure that if I change the e-mail associated with an account from a Gmail account to a non-Gmail account, following Google's instructions, all of my content, apps, and relationships will be preserved. Can someone with direct experience confirm this?

Answer 1

You dont need to worry as all of the data is stored in phone and synced with the Google account. This means that those settings and bookmarks can be accessed anywhere from where you login BUT along with this they are also part of your phone cache and memory. So the bookmarks and other settings won't be lost even if you delete your Google Account. Moreover whenever you will login from your new Google Account those bookmarks and settings will also get synced to that account.

Answer to Your questions

1. Once you delete your Google account you will get an error on mobile and it will ask to login from an existing account or to make a new Google account.

2. Yes, all of your settings and bookmarks will be saved as they are also on the phone memory(as discussed above) . If you want to associate those settings to new Google account you just need to login from that account(after you have deleted your current account)

3. Yes all of your links will continoue to work as all of them are dynamic links.

4. Your cached data will remain saved. You dont need to reinstall any app. All of your data will remain safe.

Answer 2

Okay, let me clear you about all your doubts. Explaining with screenshots so that you don't have anymore confusions:

1. If I delete my Gmail account, what happens next. Will I just be asked to supply an existing e-mail as a replacement?

I assume you have visited https://myaccount.google.com/ and logged in there and clicked on Delete your account or services under Account preferences tab, where you will see 2 options. In your case, you wanted to replace your Gmail account with another mail service keeping all other services and settings intact. So, select the 1st option stating Delete products. What this option does is you can manually remove one or more google services which includes Gmail too but not the whole Google account.

N.B.: Google Account and Gmail id are not the same account. Gmail is just one of the services of many services provided by Google Account.

When you click on Delete products, for extra security you will have to sign in again providing the password of your gmail account. Next after logging in you will see something like this:

By clicking Download Data option you can take the backup of all the data including Mail, Notes, Searches, Location History, Blogs and so on attached with your google account. It is wise to keep a backup of those in case something goes wrong.

Now when we will click on Delete icon beside Gmail, you will see something like this:

SO, you must have to provide another non Gmail new e-mail id, without which the present Gmail account will not be deleted. After that they will send a confirmation e-mail to your newly provided E-mail id. After that your present Gmail account will be deleted whether all other services will be attached to your new E-mail.

2. Will all of my existing content and accounts (all of those above, search history, bookmarks, etc.) associated with the deleted Gmail account be preserved and simply now be associated with the newly supplied e-mail account?

Yes, they will be associated with new one. But only the mails will not be supplied to your new E-mail id as usual.

3. Will links that I shared from the old e-mail (e.g. to Docs) continue to work?

Yes, the links will work. The links are created from Google Docs or similar services but not from gmail. So, the links are preserved as it was.

4. What will happen to cached or downloaded content associated with mobile apps (e.g. Photos or Docs on iOS)? Will these simply be reassigned to the new e-mail or will they need to be re-downloaded?

Not pretty sure about this matter as I have no iOS compatible device and I also don't know whether iOS devices use Gmail as the app store access mail. But if would be Android, all the apps downloaded from Play Store associated with the previous account will be as it was. And for appdata (cached or downloaded content), I think you may have to re-download them or simply re-syncing them may solve the issue. But surely you will not loose any of your contents.