A modern life runs through a handful of online accounts — email, photos, messages, files, social profiles, and the password manager that guards the rest. When someone dies, each of those accounts behaves by its own rules. There is no single process and no single answer, and that surprises families twice: first, that some doors open easily, and then, that others don’t exist at all.
Three kinds of doors
Nearly everything a provider does after a death falls into one of three shapes. Knowing which shape you’re dealing with — for each account, not just in general — can save a family months.
A tool you set up yourself
A few providers let you decide now: name a person, choose what they can receive, and the provider carries out your instructions when the time comes. Google’s Inactive Account Manager, Apple’s Legacy Contact, Meta’s legacy contact, and OneDrive’s digital legacy all work roughly this way. Where these tools exist they are the easiest path by far — and most people never turn them on.
A paperwork process
Most other providers handle death the way they handle everything else: a form, some documents, a wait. The family proves the death and their relationship, and the provider closes or memorializes the account. What the family almost never receives is the account itself — the password, the inbox, the messages.
No door at all
And some things cannot be opened by anyone. Data protected by encryption the provider itself cannot read — a keychain of passwords, an end-to-end-encrypted conversation — does not yield to paperwork, because no document changes the math. The company doesn’t hold a key either. The only path in is the one the owner leaves behind.
The tools worth turning on today
Each of these is free, takes minutes, and only activates after you’re gone. The details differ, but they share one idea: your instructions, set up in advance, come first.
Google: Inactive Account Manager
You choose how long the silence lasts before anything happens, and up to ten people to notify when it does. For each person you choose what they receive — just a note, or a download link for the parts of your account you picked: mail, photos, Drive files. They hear nothing until the waiting period passes. One caution: if you set nothing up at all, Google’s published policy reserves the right to delete an account that stays inactive for at least two years.
Apple: Legacy Contact
You name one or more people, and each receives an access key — you can send it by message, or print it and store it with your estate papers. After your death, they request access with that key and a death certificate. They can reach photos, messages, notes, files, and device backups — but not your purchased movies, music, books, or subscriptions, and not your iCloud Keychain, which holds payment information, passwords, and passkeys. Setting one up needs a device running iOS 15.2, iPadOS 15.2, or macOS Monterey 12.1 or later — but the person you name doesn’t need an Apple device or account at all.
Meta: memorialization and the legacy contact
Facebook’s word for a deceased person’s profile is memorialized: the word “Remembering” appears beside the name, the profile stops surfacing in suggestions and birthday reminders, and no one can log in to it — ever. A legacy contact, chosen in advance, can accept friend requests, change the profile and cover photos, and download a copy of what you shared if you enabled that option. Without one, nothing on the profile can be changed. You can also choose the opposite: to have the account permanently deleted after your death rather than memorialized.
OneDrive: digital legacy
Microsoft’s account-wide answer comes later in this guide — but OneDrive has its own tool, and it’s worth separating out. You invite a trusted contact and share a code that does not expire — something that can be written into a will or left with an attorney. With the code, your contact requests access, waits seventy-two hours, and receives read-only access to your files. It covers OneDrive only, the contact needs a Microsoft account, and it has to be set up before it’s needed.
When there’s no tool: the paperwork path
For accounts without a legacy tool, the family deals with each provider’s deceased-user process. Microsoft’s is the clearest illustration of how far that path does — and doesn’t — go.
Microsoft: the court-order reality
If your family knows the password, they can sign in and retrieve what they need — Microsoft doesn’t need to be notified. If they don’t, Microsoft cannot simply hand over access: releasing an account’s contents generally requires a valid subpoena or court order, formally served on Microsoft’s registered agent — and Microsoft’s own page cautions that even then, help isn’t guaranteed. Meanwhile the clock runs: an Outlook.com mailbox and its OneDrive files freeze after one year of inactivity and are deleted not long after, and the Microsoft account itself expires after two years. Subscriptions don’t stop on their own, either — the bank or card issuer has to cancel the recurring charges.
Everyone else
Every other provider runs some version of this. For any account not covered in this guide, search the provider’s help center for “deceased” — if a process exists, that’s where it lives. Expect to prove the death and your relationship to the person. And expect the answer to stop at closing or memorializing the account: providers that never built a hand-over tool generally don’t make exceptions, because their terms were never written for one.
Password managers: the master key
Everything so far is a side door into a single account. The password manager is the front door to nearly all of them — which makes it the most important planning decision in this guide, and the one most plans forget.
Bitwarden: Emergency Access
Bitwarden builds the answer in. You designate trusted contacts and choose what they can do — view your vault, or take it over — and you set a waiting period. When a contact requests access, you can approve it yourself; if you never respond, access is granted automatically when the wait time lapses. The feature needs a paid plan on the owner’s side, but the person you name needs only a free account.
1Password: the Emergency Kit
1Password takes the opposite approach: there is no emergency-access feature. Instead, every account has an Emergency Kit — a PDF holding your sign-in details and Secret Key, with a space for your account password — and 1Password’s own guidance is to give a copy to someone you trust, “like your spouse or someone in your will.” Whoever holds the kit can sign in. The kit, kept somewhere safe with clear instructions, is the difference between a family that can reach everything and a family that can reach nothing.
The principle
Whichever manager you use, decide now who can reach it and how. A password manager with no succession plan turns one lost password into every lost password — and no provider tool in this guide can fix that.
The tools take ten minutes while you’re alive. Without them, your family gets months of paperwork — or a locked door.
Where the law fits
Most states have adopted a version of the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act — RUFADAA — and it quietly explains everything above. Under that framework, your instructions through a provider’s own online tool come first; then your will, trust, or power of attorney; and only after those, the provider’s default terms of service. It also separates the catalogue of your communications — who you wrote to, and when — from their content, which an executor generally can’t read without your explicit authorization. This is state law, so the details vary, and our guide to crypto and digital assets walks through it in full. The practical point stands: the tools in this guide outrank everything else — which is why they’re worth the ten minutes.
What this means for your plan
None of these tools helps with an account your family doesn’t know exists. A Legacy Contact on your Apple account does nothing for the email address you used before it, the cloud drive full of documents, or the photo library somewhere else entirely.
So the plan has two layers. First, turn on the tools where they exist — Google, Apple, Meta, OneDrive — and decide the password-manager answer. Second, keep a simple, private map of which accounts you have and what you want done with each, somewhere your family will actually find it. That second layer is exactly what Trust Relay keeps: not the passwords — we never hold those — but the map, delivered to the people you name, only when it’s needed.
Common questions
Can my family get into my Google account after I die?
If you set up Google’s Inactive Account Manager, yes — in the way you chose. You pick the people (up to ten), what each of them can download, and how long your account must be inactive before anything happens. Without it, Google does not provide a general way for family to access an account’s contents, and Google’s published policy reserves the right to delete an account that has been inactive for at least two years. The tool is free and takes minutes — it’s the version of this conversation you control.
What can an Apple Legacy Contact actually see?
Photos, messages, notes, files, and device backups — most of what lives in an Apple Account. They cannot access purchased movies, music, books, or subscriptions, and they cannot see your iCloud Keychain, which holds payment information, passwords, and passkeys. To request access after your death they need two things: the access key generated when you named them, and your death certificate. You can name more than one Legacy Contact, and any of them can individually make decisions about the data — including deleting it.
Will Microsoft give my family my Outlook and OneDrive files?
Not simply. If your family can sign in, they can retrieve everything — Microsoft doesn’t need to be notified. Without the password, releasing an account’s contents generally requires a valid subpoena or court order served on Microsoft’s registered agent, and Microsoft cautions that even that doesn’t guarantee help. The timelines are short: the mailbox and OneDrive files freeze after a year of inactivity and are deleted not long after. One narrow exception: OneDrive’s digital legacy tool gives read-only access to a trusted contact — but only if you set it up in advance.
Should I put my passwords in my will?
No. A will passes through executors, lawyers, and courts — a secret written there stops being one, and the document was never meant to guard one. The better shape: keep passwords in a password manager, set up its succession feature (Bitwarden’s Emergency Access, or a shared 1Password Emergency Kit), and leave clear instructions about where the kit or recovery method can be found. Trust Relay is built for exactly that layer — the map and the instructions, never the secrets themselves.
What happens to a Facebook account when someone dies?
Facebook memorializes the profile: the word “Remembering” appears beside the name, the profile stops surfacing in suggestions and birthday reminders, and no one can log in to it. A legacy contact you chose in advance can accept friend requests, update the profile and cover photos, download a copy of what you shared if you enabled that, or have the account deleted. You can instead choose permanent deletion after death. Without a legacy contact, nothing on a memorialized profile can be changed — and anyone with the proper documents can request memorialization after a death.
The ten-minute version
Pick one account from this guide and set up its tool now — Google and Apple are the two most families gain from. Decide who holds the password-manager kit. Then write down which accounts exist and what you want done with each, and put that map somewhere it will be found. Trust Relay keeps it private, current, and ready — and delivers it only to the people you choose, only when it’s needed.