Protecting Your Email Accounts

I recently worked with a lady that was locked out of her gmail account. Unfortunately this is a fairly common issue, especially for us older folks. Another person had her Gmail account taken over by a hacker who used it to send out emails requesting "help" for a family member. How does this happen, you ask? It's a pretty simple answer. In the first case she simply had not set up her account's security settings in case she forgot her password. She also did not have any two factor authentication in place that would have prevented a hacker from taking over her account. Have you ever looked at your account's security settings? It's not something that many people do. Do you use two factor authentication? Let's talk about email security.

Why Is Your Email Account So Important?

Our email address is used so often for things other than just email. Internet services will require you to register with an email account. Do you use Facebook, Instagram, or Slack, etc for communicating with family and friends? How about Amazon.com or other online shopping sites? There are informational websites or forums that also require you to create an account.

Think of Your Email Account As a Key

In our world today, our email account is just like a KEY that we use to access all the various internet services out there. We probably all know what it would be like to lose a set of car keys or house keys. Our email "key" is just as important to safeguard! Should we lose access to our email account, we will likely lose control of all those internet services we regularly access.

Can't Access an Online Website Account?

Everyone forgets a website password at some point, unless they are using Password Managers. How many times have we clicked on the little "Forgot Your Password" link? We enter our email address and pretty quickly they send us an email back with a process to retrieve our password. A new password is created and we are good to go. That system actually works well until ...

I Can't Access My Email Account

The website we wanted to access is no longer accessible because we can't get to the password reset email that was sent to us. We NEVER want to lose access to our email account! Depending on how websites and email providers have set up their systems, there are basically 3 ways to recover those accounts.

• Answer the security questions that were previously entered
• Have the email or website provider send us a confirmatory text via phone
• Have the email or website provider send us a comfirmatory email to the one on file

Have Your Ever Looked At Your Email Security Settings?

Hopefully your security settings are current. It's not uncommon for folks to have no security information on file for their email accounts. Google has become better at periodic email reminders for us to review our security settings. Maybe we had entered correct information in the past. However, for a variety of different reasons, our phone number or email address changed since then so those items in our security settings are no longer current. Or, perhaps we didn't write down those challenge security questions and answers. What do you do now?

Internet based email providers like Google or Microsoft require current information be provided to verify that the account you are trying to get access to is actually yours. That information is your identity to them. If this information can not be provided, your account is "dead". You have lost control of your email account!

If you are using a local internet provider that also provides you with email service, you have a much better chance of recovering your account because you can go there in person, show them your identification and have them reset your password to your account. There is one disadvantage of using a local internet provider's email services. Should you ever move or change internet providers, the email address you may have been using for a long time will no longer be available to use.

Access to Your Website Accounts Are Attached to My Email Address

Here's a potential scary scenario. You no longer have access to your email account. You realize that you have used your now defunct email address to register on "100+" different websites.

Why is this a problem? Websites that you have forgotten passwords to will no longer be accessible to you if the only way to recover access is through your now defunct email account. What about those "100+" websites that you can still access? You are going to have to login and change your profile email to your newly created one. Oh ... and what about all those friends of yours that you maintain contact with? You are going to have to send them your new email address. Oh wait ... were all their email addresses stored in your old email account's contact list? Another big "Oh NO!", because you can't access them now. Can you begin to see how important it is that you PROTECT your email account?

How Do I Protect My Email Account?

• Create a STRONG password that is unique and NOT used for ANY other website accounts. This will help prevent the hackers from gaining access to your account.
• Use, if possible, what is called Two Factor Authentication. You set this up in your security settings. How this works is when you use a browser to access your internet email account, the account recognizes a correct username and password, but then will send you either and email or a text message to your phone with typically 6 random digits that you will additionally enter into the browser login process. This process then validates that you are indeed the account owner.
• BE SURE YOUR ACCOUNT SETTINGS ARE ALWAYS UP TO DATE! Make it a habit of checking these settings every few months and certainly after you change your phone number, or an email address. Be sure to store your "challenge questions and answers" in a safe place.

I Have My Email Account Protected, Now What?

If you follow good security measures with your email account, you should have no future problems. There is another consideration to think about and that is the use of an email "alias". An alias is an additional email address associated with your primary email account. You can receive emails to the email account alias, but you can not send from it. If you start getting too much junk coming into that alias account, you can always delete it and create a new one. I would not use an alias with accounts that you access regularly since you would have to be sure to go back an change the email address before deleting the alias.

Use an alias email account for junk sites that require a login but that you would not care if you "lost access" to it. Many "junk sites" sell your contact information to companies (data brokerages) that harvest that recorded information to sell it again. Your contact and other information may be found in many hundreds of these brokerage sites, being bought, sold, and distributed many times over. I personally use a paid for service to routinely monitor what sites have my contact and other stored information, and then request on my behalf to have that information removed from their database. You can help to keep your personal email address out of the hands of marketers and hackers by keeping your internet "footprint" small. You are NOT limited to just one email alias. Apple Mail has a "Hide My Email" feature that allows you to create a new email address for each site you subscribe to.

For information about Outlook.com alias email accounts, CLICK HERE.

For information about Gmail.com alias email accounts, CLICK HERE