If you don’t log into your webmail account, the account and all the e-mail contained within it might eventually get deleted. It happens with most webmail services we can think of, but the question is: how long does it take?

After reading an interesting discussion on this topic over at Reddit, we’ve decided to check out how it works for various popular webmail services out there. We’ve linked to their Terms of Service and quoted the most important parts of it.

It’s important to notice the subtle differences in language. For example, Hotmail claims that after a period your emails “are deleted;” Gmail never says that, they claim that they “may delete” your emails. Also, keep in mind that we’ve heard of cases where accounts and/or emails weren’t deleted even after staying dormant for years, contrary to the terms of service.

Yahoo Mail – 4 months.

From Yahoo answers: “A Yahoo! account which hasn’t been logged in to over a 4 month period is called dormant account. Dormant accounts are de-activated at the end of four months.”

Gmail – 9 months.

“If you don’t log in to Gmail within three months of it being labeled dormant — or for nine consecutive months — Google may delete the address.”

AOL Mail – 30 days.

“We reserve the right to cancel any free e-mail account that is inactive for more than 30 days, and any data on a deactivated account may not be retrieved later.”

Hotmail – 120 days.