For about 6 years but I shall share a story cause why not. I don't remember the exact details of how it unraveled.

So for a lot of time I had an unverified account, one that wasn't linked to any email. I just browsed as usual. Then one day my account got 'locked' and I had to verify it through a mail to unlock it. Now, I think I went ahead and tried linking it to my mail (or it might even be that I tried linking it from the very beginning but never got a confirmation mail), but I wouldn't get any mail. I tried regaining access for a while but I soon made a second account to be able to interact with the content. Now I believe some time had passed and I remembered about my first account, got determined to unlock it. I even contacted support about it. It was at that time that I noticed what went wrong. I had a typo in the mail I had provided, just one letter. That is why I never got any mail, but there still was a problem: there was no option to edit and correct the mail I had given them. I was devastated, there was no way to get that confirmation mail at this point.. unless? What if I created a new email account, one with the typo, so I could receive that mail? I did just that. Created a new google mail account for the sole purpose of getting that mail. I did it, got the mail, unblocked my account, changed the linked mail and deleted the typo-mail account.

I finally got my original account back. I continued however to use the second one, it was more up to date with my interests at the time, but I was happy I managed to solve the issue - no thanks to support.

Thanks for reading my story, have a nice day :)