@tek Did some QA for Google back in the day.
The vendor I worked for had a 90-day password recycling policy (and of course, you could not use an old one.) If you wanted it recovered, you had to call a phone line that would email a PDF of a screencap of your temporary password. (Which I couldn't see, naturally)...
My work email from google (the one I actually used) had none of these restrictions.
There is a lesson here, but no one was inclined to learn it.