Bulk delete users recovery phone numbers or emails in Google Workspace

In this blog post, we will learn how to bulk delete users recovery phone numbers or emails in Google Workspace. Did you ever experience any problems while trying to sign in to your Google account? If yes, then you should add recovery information like - phone numbers and emails to your Google Workspace account. They will help you to sign in to your Google account again by receiving verification codes from Google. You can set up a recovery phone number or email address or change a recovery phone number or email for your Google account. Sometimes Google Admin may want to delete your recovery information if it becomes no longer necessary. The Google Admin can delete the recovery phones, and recovery emails of any user from Google Workspace.

From this article, we will learn about the process of deleting recovery information for multiple users with the aid of Foresight.

How Bulk delete users recovery phone numbers emails in Google Workspace can help?

When you set up a recovery phone number or email address, your Google account gets extra security from suspicious activities. They help –

• Sign in to your Google account when you are locked out from your account.
• When you forget your password or someone else changes your password.
• When someone deletes your account, after getting your account back, it will automatically help recover the deleted emails and deleted phone numbers.
• Block a stranger from using your account without your permission.
• Notify you in case of any possible hacking activity on your account.
• Adding the recovery information, can help prove your identity easily when trying to login from unknown devices or trying to recover your account.

But the recovery info becomes unnecessary when there is no problem in the user’s account. In that case, Google admin might delete them. Also, they can do it for multiple users at a time by bulk deleting user recovery phone numbers or emails when required.

Bulk delete user recovery phone numbers or emails in Google Workspace with Foresight

Foresight is a SaaS platform to help businesses streamline and automate Google Workspace workflows without learning to code. It empowers administrators and users to design complex business workflows that cannot be done with native Google Cloud Services and work smarter.

Google Admin Console has a feature of bulk deleting user recovery phone numbers or emails by uploading a CSV via Bulk update users option. There you need to add three columns in your Google Sheet – Email, Recovery Email, and Recovery Phone. But when using Foresight, you only have to add the Email column for your CSV. Because it’s capable of deleting recovery phones and emails from Google Workspace only from the CSV data of the user Emails, and makes it a smarter approach. That’s the advantage of using Foresight.

Instructions

Demo Video

Rule Creation

First, you need to prepare a list of users. There is one column in the sheet- Email. Please note, for the demo purpose we only take 27 users, while in real cases, we can handle thousands of users at a time. Next, download the Google Sheet in CSV (comma-separated value) format.

1. Sign in to your Foresight account with the help of a Google Admin account.  Go to the Rules page and click on the New Rule button.
2. Select the Data uploaded trigger and upload the CSV file with updated information. Wait for the file to be parsed.
3. After that, click on Next. Now select the Update recovery email action.
4. In this step, you need to grant permission for Foresight through the Google Workspace account. Once you have done it successfully, the status will be changed to Access granted.
5. In the User primary email field select Email. This time you should leave the Recovery email field empty.
6. Click Add Next Action. Then select Update recovery phone action. Again, select Email in the User primary email field. Leave the Phone number field empty. Then click Review.
7. Now enter the Rule name (Bulk delete users’ recovery emails and phones) and click  Create. You will see the rule has been created.

Rule Triggering

To trigger the rule, click on the upload icon of the rule card and upload the same CSV file again. This process will take a few seconds.

Verifying Results

1. Notification will come in the top-right corner of the Rules page. You can see the successful execution status of the rule after clicking on it. Then click on the View Log option within the notification to view the log details. Also, you can see it from the Logs page. It shows the successful triggering of the rule.
2. Finally, confirm it from the Google admin console. Then go to the user’s Security section by navigating to:
   1. Users, then find a specific user by Filter,
   2. Click on the username, 
   3. Click on Security, and click on Recovery Information.

Now you can see the Recovery information (recovery email and recovery phone) deleted for the user. You can get the same result for the other users by repeating this process.

(Before deleting)

(After deleting)

Conclusion

Recovery information- phone numbers, and emails come in handy on different occasions, but when an admin has to delete those for multiple users, it can be challenging. But with solutions like Foresight, that is not difficult anymore. Google admin does have this feature, but Foresight offers a more precise process for IT admins to do this task. You can also read- Set up password recovery for users, How to recover your Google account or Gmail, Verify your account, Secure hacked or compromised Google account, etc. Also, here are some worthy blog post to read from xFanatical blog Bulk show hide user in Google Workspace, Bulk Block Mobile Devices In Google Workspace.