About a year ago my laptop was stolen at the airport. I bought another, but could not remember my Gmail password, not could I remember the answers to the private questions, nor had I registered a call phone with Google.
So, I accepted that I had lost a bunch of memories and created a new Gmail account (being careful not to be so dumb this time).
Here is where it get interesting ... I found an old hard-drive over the weekend; the one which had originally been in the stolen laptop before I swapped it for a larger one.
I booted from it - into Windows Vista and it auto-started my old Google Chat account. Yay!!
From that, I can see my chat sessions - and also my email. But that is a bit clumsy.
I reckon that the auto-login details must be stored somewhere (registry?). Is there any program which can retrieve my password? I tried the utilities from NIRsoft but they did not work. Is there something better?
Since Google chat lets me see my email, is there anyway that I can download it all to my PC? Mybe by using Thunderbird, etc, maybe by a Gmail backup or export function?
I would also like to get back my passwords for yahoo mail & hotmail and for Yahoo chat, but that would just be a bonus, as my Gmail is what I would really like to get.
And, yes, I did write to Google and they were friendly and understanding and cited security issues and would not let me rest the password on the mail account.
I hope that someone will help me and that others will make a backup of their passwords and security questions before this happens to them.