In yesterday’ blog post, (2019 Begins), one of the New Year’s Resolutions I mentioned was: “Update my security questions, email address and/or phone number with all my online accounts like email, etc.” A number of people told me they didn’t understand what I was talking about. Thus, today’s post!

Many online accounts – such as email (Gmail, Outlook.com mail, Yahoo Mail, etc.) have ways of recovering your password. People will forget their passwords or, worse yet, their account gets hacked and their password is changed without their knowledge. There are basically three ways most companies offer to recover your password and to prove you’re the person who actually owns the account.

1. When you originally set up the account, they may have asked you to answer a number of security questions – usually three. Normally, they give you a list of questions from which to choose and then you fill in an answer. When you go to recover your password, you must answer the questions successfully.
2. Instead of security questions (or in addition to), you may be asked to give a recovery email address. This would be an email address where the company could send a link or a verification code so that you could reset your password.
3. The third method of recovery would be using a phone number to which the company could call or text you a recovery key.

Now, here’s why this was on the resolution list for yesterday: many, many times these methods fail when trying to reset a password. Why? Because the customer: a) can’t remember their answers to the security questions; b) changed email addresses and no longer has access to the email address they originally put in as a way of recovering their password; c) has changed phone numbers and can’t be reached at the old phone number.

What does this mean for you? It means you should log into accounts like email, Internet Service Provider, electric company, phone company, etc., and check the method of password recovery before it’s too late! Don’t delay – do it now!