How long do you keep my data?
Google stays the authoritative source of your mail, calendar, contacts and tasks, and most of what we hold from it is a cache. A message body we fetch lives about fifteen minutes — in the memory of the process that fetched it, never written down — and then it is gone.
One thing is not a cache, and it is worth knowing about. When you ask the assistant to read or reply to an email thread, it keeps the messages of that thread as the conversation it is replying in. That conversation stays in your account for as long as the account does, the same as anything else you make here, and it is what your derived memory is built from. You can delete a single conversation in the app, and deleting your account deletes them all.
When you delete your account we remove your data from our live systems within 30 days, and residual copies age out of our encrypted backups within 90 days.
Some records are kept longer where required — authentication and security audit events are kept as security records, and legal holds can extend retention where the law requires. The exact windows for each are in the Data Retention & Deletion Policy.
Four things the assistant builds from your mail are kept for as long as your account is, and the policy lists each by name. The cards on your Agenda, and the one-line summaries written for its items, stay until you delete your account — a card about an email is retired when you archive or delete that message in Gmail, and a card you dismiss is dropped, but nothing ages them out by date, and a card or summary can carry the name of the person who wrote to you and the subject line of the message. A record of who you wrote to in your 100 most recent sent messages — the To line, never the text — is rebuilt every six hours and goes with your account. And when another Lonzo account holder writes to you, a small link between your copy of the conversation and theirs is kept in each of the two accounts; the one in their account is theirs, and deleting yours does not remove it.
Email you send to support is the one thing account deletion does not erase. A support case — your address, your subject line, and our notes on how we handled it — is kept as readable text rather than under your account keys, because anyone can write to support, including someone with no account at all. So it is bounded by time instead: 30 days after we close the case, or 180 days from the last activity if it is still open, and then it is deleted. That includes the message in which you asked us to delete your account, if you asked by email. Asking from Account → Delete account in the app opens a case too — a person still carries the deletion out — but that one holds no address and no words of yours: your session identified you, so there is no message to keep.
See also: How do I delete my data? · How is my data secured?