Hello dougp, we are reaching out to inform you about the status of your account with us.
If you wish to retain access to your account, we kindly request that you log in within the next 7 days. Failure to do so will result in the permanent deletion of your account.
Please follow the link below to login and confirm your interest in keeping your account: https://id.arduino.cc.
If you received this email by mistake, simply delete it. Your account won't be deleted if you don't click the confirmation link above.
Hi @dougp. In order to comply with data protection regulations, Arduino has a policy of deleting arduino.cc user accounts that have been in an inactive state for 24 months. It is expected that you will receive an email warning if your account is approaching this deadline.
What might be confusing is that Arduino Forum is actually a separate website from arduino.cc, so activity on Arduino Forum does not count as arduino.cc account activity. However, the inactive user account deletion policy still affects Arduino Forum users, as authentication to your forum account is only possible through the arduino.cc account. The forum authentication is persistent, so you may be able to use Arduino Forum for long periods of time without ever needed to perform a log in on arduino.cc.
It is always possible that the email could be a phishing attack, and you were wise to be skeptical about it. However, you can avoid any possibility of danger by manually navigating to the login on the arduino.cc website and log in there. Please do so to ensure your account is preserved. The possible danger would come from using a link in a phishing email that leads to an imposter site. But if you go to the correct website and log in, it won't do any harm even if the email was fake.
I have also noticed this. The Arduino website is designed so that it only presents the login on demand. So, for example, if you weren't logged into your Arduino Forum account and you tried to visit the forum, the login page would automatically appear. Likewise with trying to access your Arduino Cloud, Arduino Store, or Arduino Project Hub account.
