How long after I delete my account is the data really gone?

Two timelines run in parallel when you delete a Valid Email Checker account. The synchronous one finishes in well under a second — auth, profile, sessions, credit balances, 2FA, API keys, integrations, team memberships all disappear in the same transaction as the delete_user_account RPC. The asynchronous one covers verification results and uploaded CSV files, which take longer to physically remove because they are voluminous and the cleanup runs on a scheduled job.

The synchronous part — immediate

The instant you confirm deletion and the RPC returns success, the following are gone:

• Your auth.users row (so password and OAuth identities are destroyed).
• users_metadata, profile fields, notification preferences.
• Credit balance and credit history rows (PAYG, Monthly, auto-refill config).
• user_sessions and login_history rows.
• user_2fa_settings (TOTP secrets, backup codes, email 2FA toggles).
• API keys generated under Developer settings.
• Integration credentials and sync state.

The asynchronous part — within 15 days

Verification results and uploaded files are marked with results_deleted_at in verification_tasks and queued for the gdpr-cleanup job. That job is a scheduled edge function that calls perform_gdpr_cleanup_all, which works in 200-task batches with up to 100 storage files per batch. The retention threshold lives in system_settings as data_retention_days — the default value is 15 days. So a result row created (or marked for deletion) more than 15 days ago is eligible for physical removal on the next cleanup run.

In practice the cleanup runs frequently enough that the typical interval between deletion and physical purge is well under the 15-day window — most data is gone within hours. The 15-day figure is the worst case, not the typical case.

What lives in our backups

Production database backups are retained for disaster-recovery purposes. They are encrypted, access-controlled, never queried for ordinary operations, and rotated out on their own schedule. Backup retention is the only path by which any trace of your account exists past the cleanup window, and even there it is bound by our retention rotation. Backups are never restored to satisfy a recovery request — see can I recover my account after deletion for the policy.