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Updated October 9, 2023Now is a great time to go back to the list of accounts you started off with. Like me, you probably don’t have just one email account. Hopefully, unlike me, you have less than five. Either way, don’t forget to protect each of your accounts using this same process.
If you no longer use an email account, you can reset the password to something long and unique, and be done with it. But first, ask yourself a few questions and check through your inbox to see if any of the following apply:
Do important contacts still use this email to contact you, whether that is family, friends, or business contacts?
Do you get mail to this email for any accounts that are on your list that you need to protect? Is this email used as the login or password reset for those accounts?
Is this the backup email used as your account recovery option for your main account?
If the answer is yes to any of these questions, you will either need to start updating other accounts to reduce the dependency on this account, or start protecting it the same way you do your main account. This can be daunting, but consider it an investment now rather than a headache later.
This is a question I hear a lot. No email provider is perfect. Using email from large providers, such as Google and Microsoft, might have privacy trade-offs as they have a history of allowing scanning of emails for advertising purposes. On the other side of the token, you might find you are locked into a specific email provider because of the technology ecosystem you have—if all your devices are Apple products, then it might be natural to gravitate towards an iCloud email account.
The best way to tell if your email provider is safe is to see if you can make it through the steps outlined earlier for protecting your account. If there are features that are not available, like 2FA, then it is a dealbreaker when it comes to security.
danger 2FA should be considered the bare minimum. If your provider doesn’t allow it, then this is a dealbreaker and it is time to set up a new email with a provider who does. There is a great community-created website called 2FA Directory that you can use to find a new email provider. This can be a huge pain to set up, but in the long run you will thank yourself. Especially with the rise of security breaches through weak security configurations, that unsafe email provider is probably one bad press release or low valuation away from selling or shutting down that headache service.