I’ve had my particular email account for almost 8 years, and out of the blue I can no longer sign in! I tried retyping my password to make sure I entered it correctly, which I did, but it came back invalid!
So then I tried to reset it, but now the secret question has been changed as well! This is very upsetting to say the least, as I have also been a past victim of identity theft. Has anyone else ever has their email account hacked?
It took seemingly forever to find some way to notify my email provider, since none of the “FAQ” questions or the help section related to hacked or stolen accounts. But I finally found the link to send an urgent message to them so hopefully they can help quickly and restore my account… and also identify the culprit who hacked it!
One thing about me, I’m extremely tenacious and will NOT quit until this person is found and arrested! I will hire a professional computer hack specialist, PI, whatever it takes if need be, and this rat will be trapped! (No appropriate smilie found)
I suggest you learn ho to ‘hack’ e-mails, not to get people back or to ever try it on someone else e-mail except your own, but for learning purposes.
A search on google will give you tons of guides and videos about it, and it will show you how to do it, but with this knowledge, you also know how to avoid it and catch the warning signs of it happening.
Thanks. it’s scary because I have so many business contacts stored over the years, I don’t even clearly rememberknow if my social security or even credit card info is also stored somehwere that I don’t know about. I’ve used that account so many times to buy stuff online from ebay, UDC, piano supply. This is very worrisome. It’s a very helpless feeling because now I can’t even close it or disable it.
Well first off, check and recheck both the username and password a few more times, especially the user name. I have accounts all over the place, and even though I generally try to stay with my same few usernames and passwords, I’m constantly mixing them up or getting them slightly wrong.
It looks like that’s probably not you’re case. But what you mentioned could have been caused by putting in the wrong user name.
i personally like yahoo, but gmail is okay…but seriously dude, see if you can learn to hack into your account, i had to learn that too, it took me about a week, but you can do it. i hope this works out for you.
p.s., try sending an email to your account to see if he mails back
If the account did actually get compromised you’ll need to assume that they know your password. If you have any other accounts and such that use the same or similar password you’ll want to change the password(s) on all of those other accounts.
It’s not a given that they know your password. There are ways of stealing web email accounts by stealing your cookie(s), or maybe you logged in at a computer and didn’t log out fully.
Holy cow! I don’t know HOW but I got my account back! Evidently it was not hacked or stolen. My browser of choice and the one I use almost exclusively is firefox. So for the heck of it, I opened up my IE browser and low & behold, my email account simply opened!
I was totally signed OUT in the firefox browser, so I assumed no matter which browser I used, I would still be signed out of my email server! But no, there it was with everything there! So I quickly changed my password and secret question and all that stuff.
Also resent a message to the server telling them to cancel my previous request to help me with possible account theft. I had spent hours last night changing my email address on file with all my utility companies, businesses and whoever else had my old email address!
Turns out it was all for not, but at least I learned a good lesson and know what to do if it really does happen! Thanks all for the tips and advice!:):):)
PS: as the server suggests, the new email address I created last night will now be my alternate in case I cannot access the original at some point.
I don’t like secret questions for services I want to be secure. I make a secure password and then they ask for a simple english phrase that will bypass the password? Dumb.
So my secret answer in cases like that is ham fingers mashing the keyboard. Something like this:
Where did you go to high school? a;lskjdfjkl;qwijhobjisFDZ/.,mdxaf.m
I record the answer in my password safe just in case.
I never give a proper answer for the questions, because no doubt someone will know the answer, and they arent hard questions either, so it becomes even easier.
Something that everybody should think about. Are you trusting a “free” email provider to safeguard all your mail archives? Bad idea. Though the major names are probably not going anywhere, since they’re free services, they probably have verbage in their user agreements that state they’re not responsible for any of your stored data. Or something to that effect if a disaster occurs.
At a minimum, you should backup any of your online email archives onto your own computer (then back that up). Also maybe get rid of stuff that doesn’t need to be there, in the unlikely event your account does get hacked.
I prefer paying for my email account. I’m responsible for what I do with it (though my provider is responsible for not losing my data), but I can always do with it whatever I need to.
Done. And since it turned out that my email account had not been hacked/stolen, I went through everthing quite thoroughly, and didn’t find any important data stored in my account(s). The only place I had really wondered about was in my “drafts” and “sent” and custom folders, as I have made ebay, paypal and business transactions.
And like I mentioned before, this is probably a good thing to have happened as it gave me a wake up call to be much more careful and mindful of internet security or lack thereof.:o
:)
Dumb.