![]() I can't see that happening unless you're in some sort of hostage situation, and at that point I think email security is the least of your problems. (You can check the "remember me for 30 days on this device" checkbox so you don't have to do this every time.) With this in place, even if they discover your super sekrit email password, would-be hackers can't do anything useful with it! To access your email, they'd need to somehow gain control of your cell phone, too. Once this is enabled, accessing your email always requires the password, and a code delivered via your cell phone. Now your password alone is no longer enough to access your email. Enter the numeric code sent through the text message to proceed. You just need a telephone that can receive SMS text messages. GMail will walk you through the next few steps. On the account settings page, click "edit" next to 2-step verification and turn it on. From here, click "Account" to view your account settings. Expand the little drop-down user info panel at the top right of most Google pages. What matters is that until you turn this on, your email is vulnerable. The fancy geek technical term for this is two factor authentication, but that doesn't matter right now. The good news, at least if you use GMail, is that you can make your email virtually hacker-proof today, provided you own a cell phone. It's exceedingly close to that in practice. You should start thinking of security for your email as roughly equivalent to the sort of security you'd want on your bank account. Email is a one stop shop for online identity theft. When you lose control of your email to a hacker – not if, but when you lose control of your email to a hacker – the situation is dire. Your email is the skeleton key to your online identity. Now get everyone you know to read it, too. At some point over the past six years, our correspondence would certainly have included every number or code that was important to us – credit card numbers, bank-account information, medical info, and any other sensitive data you can imagine. The greatest practical fear for my wife and me was that, even if she eventually managed to retrieve her records, so much of our personal and financial data would be in someone else’s presumably hostile hands that we would spend our remaining years looking over our shoulders, wondering how and when something would be put to damaging use. In my inbox I found a message purporting to be from her, followed by a quickly proliferating stream of concerned responses from friends and acquaintances, all about the fact that she had been “mugged in Madrid.” The account had seemed sluggish earlier that morning because my wife had tried to use it at just the moment a hacker was taking it over and changing its settings-including the password, so that she couldn’t log in again. ![]() By that time, I was up and looking at e‑mail, and we both quickly saw what the real problem was. When came back to her desk, half an hour later, she couldn’t log into Gmail at all. Don't believe me? Just read this harrowing cautionary tale. It's only a matter of time until your email gets hacked.
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