The average person has between 70-80 passwords. You have passwords for work, shopping, social media, and bank accounts.
There are a lot of passwords to remember, and you’re bound to forget them every once in a while. The worst is when you forget your email password. You can lose precious time and opportunities trying to regain your email access.
How can you get back into your email easily?
Read on to discover how you can recover your email password on the various email platforms and how you can keep all of your passwords organized.
Recover Passwords on Gmail
Gmail is the most popular email platform, used by 1.5 billion active users around the world. Gmail is tied to your Google account, so you have one password for YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, and all other Google products.
Google makes it pretty easy to recover your password. On the login screen, click on “Forgot Password.” You’ll enter your email address and then answer a couple of more questions to confirm your identity.
Once your identity is confirmed, then you can create a new password.
Your account may have two-factor authentication. In this instance, you can have a notification sent to your phone to confirm your identity. You approve the notification and proceed to change your password. You can find out more about Google account recovery by checking your settings in Google and at https://setapp.com/how-to/google-account-recovery.
Hotmail Password Recovery
Does Hotmail still exist? It’s the oldest email platform that still has hundreds of millions of users. Microsoft killed the Hotmail service and migrated users to Outlook.com.
If you had an existing Hotmail.com address, you kept it. However, new users have to create an email address using Outlook.com.
It doesn’t matter what email address you use, the process to recover your password is the same. Similar to Google, Microsoft uses one login for all of your Microsoft accounts: Office 365, Skype, OneDrive, etc.
It’s pretty simple to recover your password and create a new one. You’ll enter your username or email address. You’ll have to confirm your identity, which is usually done through a text message. Once you confirm your identity, you can reset your password and start over.
To make future logins easier, install the Microsoft Authenticator app on your phone. This sends push notifications to approve logins without a password.
Get Your Password From Local Outlook Installations
There’s nothing worse than setting a password on a local Outlook installation because you can go months or years without having to input it again.
You can set your password once and have Outlook and it automatically logs you in. Until it doesn’t and it asks you for your password again.
You likely forget it, especially if you set a new strong password or used a password generator. You can’t use two-factor authentication if you’re on an Exchange server or you have Outlook locally installed.
What are your options? You can download a neat tool called MailPassView. You install it on your computer and it extracts your passwords for you.
It works with Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, and a handful of other email programs.
Importance of Strong Passwords
Can’t you just use one password that’s easy to remember across all of your accounts? You can, but it’s definitely not a good idea. You run the risk of getting a hacked account and become a victim of identity theft.
A cybersecurity company analyzed over 15 billion passwords. Out of those 15 billion passwords, about 2 billion were unique. People use numbers, sports teams, birth years, and names as their passwords.
A hacker can break into your email accounts or any other accounts without trying hard.
Do you want to make it easy for hackers to break into your accounts? Then you need to have a strong password.
Keep Your Passwords Organized
How can you have passwords that are strong and hard to crack? You can’t remember all of them, so you have to have a system in place to remember them all. They also have to be safe.
You can use a password app that generates passwords and stores them for you. One of the more popular apps is called LastPass. It’s freemium software that you can install in your web browsers. It’s an easy way to keep your passwords in one place.
The program is that you have to have a strong LastPass password that you can remember.
You can also resort to pen and paper. You have to keep your passwords safe, organized, and store the notebook in a safe spot. It’s one thing to have the notebook at home, but you don’t want to leave it in a public space like an office.
Make sure that when you write your passwords down, you take your time. You don’t want to mistake a capital I for a lowercase l when you write them down.
You might decide to have a hybrid system where you use an app for most of your accounts, but you write down your banking account information to keep it safe.
Password Recovery for Top Email Platforms
You need to have a system in place to keep your passwords safe and secure. Your passwords have to be accessible so you don’t have to memorize dozens of passwords. You’d be in a place where you have to have easy to remember passwords, making it easy for hackers to breach your accounts.
If you do have a complicated password that you can’t remember for various email platforms, know that it’s not the end of the world. You can recover your password and create a new one just by answering a few questions.
You can also set up an authenticator on your phone to make approvals fast and easy.
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