A rather long, but very informative article from a The Atlantic magazine writer whose wife's Gmail account was hacked, and what they had to do to recover all their important files and data. This is one reason I do not use any e-mail account like Gmail, but instead, store all my important e-mails on my home PC. After reading this, you may also want to take a hard look at your passwords. I know I have.

The article: http://www.theatlant.../hacked/8673/1/

 

Gotta be crazy to store stuff in email acc'ts.....

Any sensitive emails are deleted right away here..... but then... we don't put much sensitive stuff in emails.... just asking for trouble...

As for the cloud.... no way in Hades!

 

Interesting article. I've forwarded it to a bunch of my friends.

Based on the seemingly unstoppable hacking that goes on all the time anything I want to save is stored on my computer and backed up on a separate external drive.

 

That was nuts to (1) store 6 years of emails, (2) store emails with such important info on them, and, (3) if you must, to not back them up at home.

Thanks Gene, I did find the tips interesting on 'passwords'. What a pain they are. The article did motivate me to again take another look at the ones I use.

As for scams, I haven't had one tried on me since this morning's mail. Got a nice letter from US Airlines who can not understand why I have not replied to their previous correspondence to get my 2 free roundtrip airline tickets with a retail value of $1,400.

 

I use an encrypted program to keep track of my passwords. Without it I'm sure I would revert to an easy to remember (and break) password.

 

I do the same also..... now to make sure I don't forget the password I use for it!

 

What encryption program do you folks recommend? I've thought about doing that and probably should.

 

I use software called "KeePass." There's a free version (I've used it for quite a while now, so I don't recall if it has ads that I eliminated with a "donation" or whatever).

In all this it's useful to note that there are some cloud things that are useful. EverNote, for example, is useful for those things you need on multiple computers, and it provides for encryption if you want it. Both Google Chrome and Firefox let you synchronize your browsers on multiple computers, so that you always have the same set of bookmarks and so on.

But keeping all your email on your account's server (no matter where) is just dumb unless the security there is rock solid. As the Atlantic article points out, Google's Gmail servers aren't up to that level, and their support is virtually nonexistent. HPH

 

I keep an excel sheet for passwords. That's probably not secure enough if someone did hack my computer.

I don't think I have any emails important enough to keep or that have personal info that anyone would want.

 

1Password

Don't get me started on the "cloud" thing. You can take all the precautions you want but when the companies that have your data, i.e. banks and health care providers are putting your stuff "out there" unprotected there's only so much you can do.