Troubleshooting common email problems

As we all know, email has become a very important of our lives. It is the most modern form of exchanging messages and communicating with friends, family and colleagues. Without the internet and email, it would have been near impossible to keep in touch with our loved ones.

Email helps us in exchanging messages not only in the form of text but also lets us share pictures, videos, documents and some even let us chat with one or more people through them. Thanks to the power of the internet and the service we all know as email, the world indeed has become a very small place.

Even though email may seem perfect, it does have its own share of problems. We wake up one morning, turn on the computer and go to the website of our webmail service to send an important email.  We put in the username and password required to log into the account. Instead of our mail screen we are greeted by the message “Invalid username or Password”. Maybe we put in something wrong, so we try again. Same message. We try to clear our history, cookies, and temporary internet files, restart our internet and try again. This time we are notified that our account has been blocked. We are puzzled as we had checked our email a few days ago and it was fine. We never really had problems with email before, until now.

There could be only one reason to why we are facing problems with email account – Our email account has been hacked by a black hat programmer (commonly known as hackers or spammers). The worst fear of every internet user has become a shocking reality. As the internet technologies are improving, so are the hackers. They constantly look for security flaws in the services used by net surfers and take advantage of it, using their cheap and dangerous tools.

In panic, we frantically try and scan for the culprit software who let the hacker in to our system, but it’s already too late. Even if we find the rogue software, it won’t let us get rid of it easily. It has disabled our firewall, shutdown our antivirus and changed the search engine settings so that we are unable to remove the Rootkit Trojan out of the system. So now you wonder 

“How do I recover my account and fix my email settings that might have been changed?”

• The first thing you could try is to use your old password. If you can login using your old username and password, Great! But if not, you should click on “I forgot my password” (even if you never did forget it). Answer the security questions and provide the alternate email address for password recovery. If everything works out, you will have the option to reset your password.

• Change your password and make a new stronger yet easy to remember one. 

• Change your recovery information as the hacker already knows about the old recovery information. Make sure that all information in the recovery form is set by you. Remove any information that you are unaware of immediately. 

• Change your passwords for any other related sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, your bank etc) that you used to access with your email before it was hacked. Do it quickly and pray that the hacker has not done the same before you.

• Tell your contacts and the webmail service provider that your account has been hacked, not to reply to any emails/ requests from that account and to remove it from the address book.

• Back up all your security information to a external hard disk or portable media. Learn from the experience and take steps to ensure that this does not repeat in the future.