Your Email Account and Your Passport

Everyone knows how important a document their passport is, but how about your humble old email account?

What you may not realise is that your Email account is your link to many online services. If I knew your details of your email account like:

• Your email provider ( obvious normally from your address)

• Your user name (usually your display name) and

• Your password (not so easy)

Then I could read you emails. If I could read you emails I could pretend to be you! I could change your passwords, settings etc on most of your online accounts like Google, Yahoo, PayPal etc.

So how do I access your email account details? The details are on you computer and so access to your computer means I potentially have access to these details. It may even be on my computer, if you have used it to access your emails via Webmail.

Protecting Your Account Details

There are several simple steps you can follow to protect your details:

• Don't allow anyone access to your computer
• Don't access any private sites from another computer ( that isn't yours). Your access leaves traces and password recovery software will probably reveal them. Not only that but it may actually be running a keystroke logger.
• Change your email passwords frequently (at least every month). They shouldn't be the same as your computer logon password.

• Email Spying
• Email Encryption and Digital Signatures
• Internet Privacy