Samara McIlroy

Most people leave behind more online accounts than anyone knows about.

There might be a Netflix subscription still charging the estate. A Google account holding fifteen years of emails and photographs. A Facebook profile sitting there attracting birthday notifications from people who don’t know yet. A health app. Cloud storage full of work documents nobody has accessed yet.

When someone dies, these accounts don’t close themselves. They keep renewing. They may become targets for fraud. They sit in a kind of digital limbo, accumulating.

Sorting through them is part of the job now. Trace is a free tool that walks you through the process, one step at a time. You don’t need to be technically confident to use it. You need access to the person’s email account and ideally their devices. The tool does the rest.

The tool guides you through six approaches to finding accounts. You don’t have to do all of them — work through as many as you can access.

Gather what you can. You won’t necessarily have all of this — work with what’s available.

Some searches will turn up nothing. Others will surface accounts you never knew existed.

Neither is a problem. The goal is a list to give the estate something to act on. Each account you find and document is one less thing that falls through the cracks.

The tool links to resources for closing or memorialising accounts once you’ve found them — including JustDeleteMe, which has direct links to the account deletion pages for hundreds of services.

Take it one step at a time. The browser saves your progress automatically. You can come back to it.

If you’re supporting a family through this process rather than doing it yourself, Trace is designed to be handed to someone with no technical background. The instructions at each step are written for a general reader. You can sit alongside someone and work through it together, or point them to it independently.

The most useful thing you can do before they start is help them locate the email address or addresses the person used, and find out whether the devices are accessible. Everything else follows from there.