Now where is your address book?

What email program do you use? Do you have a copy of your address book? Free programs like Hotmail make life easy for large numbers of people. You can access the account from any computer, your email follows you without having to remember to redirect, plus the functionality of the various gadgets for sharing photos, video chat, etc.

The downside is when you find something has gone wrong. The same password that you have used for years just does not work, contacts are receiving strange offers from you to buy watches or Viagra. Your account has been hijacked. Sometimes you will get help from Microsoft, but it is a free service and more often than not their response seems to be to shut the accounts down. As an online resource this means that all the data, photos, contacts are lost forever.

So perhaps it is time to make a copy of your address book, be that a print out or a saved document. It would be annoying to lose saved emails, so again perhaps turn them into documents too. Or think about using one of the email programs to access Hotmail. Outlook can do this quite easily so too can Thunderbird or IncrediMail.

It is also worth looking at your password, a mixture of text and numbers make it harder to crack, but whatever you do please do not use the same password for all your security. Life is far to short for so much potential pain.