As with many online services, you must have an active email address in order to create a Dropbox account. Dropbox also requires that you have access to this email address to reset your account password. This security procedure allows us to protect your account against unauthorized access.

If you've lost access to the email address on your Dropbox account, we cannot help you regain account access. However, there are some other methods you can try to regain access.

Regaining Dropbox account access when you still have your account password

If you've lost access to the email address associated with your Dropbox account but still remember your password, try to sign in to your Dropbox account and then immediately change your email address.

Regaining Dropbox account access by contacting your email service provider

If you've lost access to your email address, we recommend that you try contacting your email service provider (ESP) to regain access to your email account. Only your ESP would have the ability and authorization to help you regain access to your email address. Dropbox is not an ESP, and cannot contact ESPs on your behalf.

Regaining Dropbox account access after an automatic password reset

Dropbox will occasionally expire passwords as a proactive security measure to protect accounts. To know if this is the issue affecting your account, try signing in to your Dropbox account again, and comparing the message you see to this error message.

• If you do not see this error message, and you don't have access to the email address or password on your Dropbox account, then we cannot help you regain access to that account.
• If you do see this error message, and you've already received an automated email response from us, please reply to this email and explain that you're seeing this error message.

Regaining Dropbox account access via another linked device

If you're unable to access your Dropbox account on dropbox.com or on one of your linked devices, consider whether you had linked your account to another device. For example, if you used Dropbox on both your home computer and a phone or tablet, perhaps you're still signed in to the app on one of those devices.

If this is the case, you can use this device to transfer your files to another, new account:

• If you still have access to a computer with your Dropbox files on it, you can transfer the files to another Dropbox account. You can do this by unlinking and relinking the Dropbox desktop application to the new account.
• If you still have access to a smartphone with the Dropbox application on it and access to a computer, you can transfer the files to another Dropbox account by using the remote installation process.

In both cases, you could also temporarily save your files to a local folder on your computer or mobile device, and then upload them to a new Dropbox account.

What to do if none of the above has worked

As mentioned in this article, if you have lost access to the email address on your Dropbox account and do not know the password, then for security reasons we cannot help you regain access to that account. Only your email service provider (ESP) can help you regain access to an email account. If your ESP is able to help you regain access, you can then request a password reset link for your Dropbox account.