This advice goes for other accounts besides just email accounts. If you switched your email in the past few years, take note:
When you set up an email account, you usually enter a “secondary” email address. When you have a login problem, the system will send an email to that secondary address.
Well, if you use hotmail or yahoo, but you haven’t logged into that account in a year, guess what? You lost that email address. So go and change that email address to something active. The best way? Use your internet provider’s address (Road Runner, Earthlink, Verizon, Comcast, Optimum, etc.).
If you lose your password from your internet provider, they can verify your identity somehow and reset your password.
Now this is an important security issue for the following reason: Let’s say you registered your bank account with a hotmail address. Let’s say you stopped using that hotmail address a year ago and have not logged in the past year. Well, that hotmail account was made inactive after 9 months and deleted after 1 year. Someone trying to break into that bank account can then go and register the correct hotmail address in their name and go forward with attempting to break into that bank account.
While the security issue is huge for a bank account, it would be an ordeal if you had a problem with your daily email and somehow you couldn’t reset your password because you no longer had access to that secondary email.
So make a little checklist for yourself today to check your accounts – and that all your emails are set to your current, correct email.
