Hacking email

Email is a wonderful thing. It's given us back the near-lost art of communication. It's like writing letters but without the delay in the post. But it has some features most of us barely understand and should be treated with respect. David is a master of email. He knows all the foibles of each of the different systems and given the chance will exploit them to his advantage. Once he has access to your email account you'd best abandon it, as nothing you send or receive will be private again. As with installing unwanted software on your computer, giving a villain access to the machine allows him to get at your email account. He'll get hold of your password by the usual trick of clicking the "I've forgotten my password" link. Some systems then dutifully send an email telling you what it is. If you are using one of these, move to another. They have no business even knowing what your password is and certainly shouldn't be sending it to you, especially as it might not be you sitting at the machine when it arrives. What they should be doing is letting you choose another password. He's not quite stupid enough to try that one; you'd spot something was up when it refused your old password just after he left. So the first lesson is never to let anyone use your computer - even to repair it - unless you're there watching. But of course you can always change the password after they leave or you get your computer back from the shop, can't you? Yes, and indeed that's a very sensible thing to do. But there are other tricks you should know about. Many systems - and GMail is one of them - allow you to set up your email account so it automatically forwards all messages to somewhere else. So David gets a copy of all your messages, even if you've changed the password. This is so simple to set up but so effective because most people don't know their way around GMail and wouldn't be able to spot the forwarding option. With the contents of your emails David stands quite a good chance of perpetrating an identity theft. I know this because he's already tried it on me, but fortunately didn't have enough information to pull it off and was spotted. So take your mail seriously. Back