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Is Your Email Account Safe?

You may or may not know that basically anything you write in an email can easily be read by many people as it gets to the person you send it to. The rule of thumb is, don’t write anything in an eamil that you wouldn’t put in a newspaper.

But there is also another danger with email.

A friend of mine who has a hotmail account just got hacked. Everyone who is listed in her account got an email that looks like it is from her and it is asking for money. She cannot get into her account to delete addresses or reply to anyone and there is no way to get a hold of hotmail, so all she can do is try to remember everyone who is in her account and then get ahold of each person.

This can happen with hotmail, yahoo, gmail, or any other free public email account. I did a google search and found information for hacking msn as well, so if you have a question, put your provider in a search for hacking and see if it comes up.

I have gmail accounts, which I use when I fill out forms online, but I have been trying to get away from using them personally, and now will probably delete one or more of them. I have consistently gone in and deleted all contacts from both accounts, but if my account is hacked, then the hacker will have access to everyone who ever emailed me or anyone I have ever emailed. And maybe some passwords too.

(by the way, if you use gmail, your email account is also connected to google voice, your blogger account and many other things, so check all those places too)

Here are some suggestions for steps to take based on my online research:

1. Use a local internet provider for your personal email, or at least a private one.
2. If you have ever had a gmail, hotmail, yahoo, msn, etc account, and stopped using it, first go back and remove all emails and empty your address book and then close it.
3. If you presently have an account with a public email, such as above, go in and print out your address book so you can alert everyone if it is hacked, then delete all emails with personal information.

This also happened to another friend of mine last fall through facebook. Some of her friends even sent money, but they didn’t know it was being sent to the hacker and it took her months to fix everything.

Be very careful online! It is not a safe place!