I used Claude to find the online accounts I’d forgotten about

A good method for tracking down forgotten online accounts is to scour your inbox for signup confirmations, and Consumer Reports has a detailed explainer on how to do just that. But I was curious to take it a step further, enlisting Claude’s help for a prompt that would automate the process, sifting through my email for me to catalog the accounts I’d collected over the years.

This prompt takes two of Consumer Reports’s best ideas — searching through your email, as well as checking sites like haveibeenowned.com for possible account breaches — and hands the busywork to Claude Cowork or another AI agent, like Google’s Gemini Spark, Meta’s Muse, or a ChatGPT Dot.

Now, this prompt does involve giving your agent access to your email, typically via a Gmail integration or connector (and all the four AI agents I just mentioned have one). If that prospect makes you uncomfortable — and that’s a perfectly reasonable reaction — by all means, skip this prompt.

Still here? OK, here’s the prompt we’re going to use:

Search my email from the last 5 years for signs that I created an account somewhere — welcome emails, “verify your email” or “confirm your account” messages, and password-reset emails. Build a new spreadsheet (a Google Sheet if you can) with one row per service: service name, website, date of the earliest signup email, date of the most recent email from them, and whether the service appears on haveibeenpwned.com’s public list of breached websites (with the breach year). For each service, find its official account-deletion page and add the link; if you can’t find one, write “not found” — don’t guess. Put services I haven’t heard from in 2+ years at the top. Don’t sign in anywhere, request password resets, type my email address into any website, delete anything, or contact anyone.

This is a lengthy prompt, by design; rather than trying to prompt to alter an AI’s behavior, we’re telling the agent what we want it to do — and what not to do.

Namely, this is a passive, hands-off search, meaning the agent won’t try to log onto any outside websites or ping anyone about your accounts. That also goes for the haveibeenowned.com search, with the agent only checking whether a given service has recently been compromised rather than plugging in your particular email address.