The Perils of an online email account (Hotmail, Gmail)

Do you use either Hotmail or Gmail (Google Mail)? What would you do if one day your password did not work? The point was brought home to us earlier this month by a customer, who in the process of changing his password, became locked out of his account. A Nightmare seven years of emails no longer accessible, all those email addresses no longer to hand.

Google have a set procedure to go through, within the account you have the opportunity to leave an alternative email address that allows contact and the means to reset your password, if something goes wrong.It also allows the use of a mobile phone to be used to send a pin number; this too allows them to help you recover access to your account. (You have to do this online, there is no phone number to call to ask or beg for help, it is all down to the online recovery process).

As it was neither of these options had been set up. In the end after several attempts over about 7 days, each attempt taking up to 24 hours to receive a reply, our customer found several printed emails from several years ago with specific information about content, dates and time. With this information, access to the account was quickly restored.

There are quite a few reasons for problems with online accounts, accounts being hacked and stolen, problems with the online servers, problems while changing passwords, being just a few.

To protect yourselves always keep a backup of your address book, save important emails as documents on your hard drive, or print them out and file them. Make sure that you know how the recovery process is likely to work and use the recovery suggestions made by the companies. Always have more than one email address to allow for password or account recovery and think seriously about changing your password on a regular basis.

One last point, please do try not to use the same password for every account, let us try and make it a little harder for the hackers to steal our information and Id’s. You lock your doors and windows, let’s try and lock down the computer just a little.