How would you react if you found yourseld locked-out of your Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail account? This Cnet article takes you through the recovery process for the main providers and gives some top advice on security questions so that you don’t find yourself locked-out.

Anyone involved in backing up computer files knows the importance of testing the recovery process, and the same applies with Web mail. The best way to ensure that you can recover or reset your password is to try it.

Yahoo password recovery (thanks to the governor of Alaska, it’s now the infamous Yahoo password recovery) starts out by asking for your birthday, country of residence, and postal code. Without this gatekeeper information, knowing the secret question is useless. Even something as simple as your postal code needs to be saved rather than remembered because, as Yahoo points out, it may be from your home, your office, or a prior residence or prior work location.

Hotmail password recovery starts with the option to either “Use my location information and secret answer to verify my identity” or to “Send password reset instructions to me in e-mail.” If you go the first route and answer the questions correctly, you get to choose a new password.

The location information is the same as Yahoo’s–country, state, and ZIP code. If you go the second route, an e-mail message is sent to the alternate e-mail account with two links, one for confirming the request and resetting the password and another for doing nothing.

Gmail error handling isn’t limited to just password recovery; they deal with a whole host of problems accessing your account, including:

• I forgot my password
• I forgot my username
• My account has been compromised
• My password doesn’t seem to be working
• Loading issues
• Another error or problem

Being smart about Web mail – CNET News

See also

Posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 in: Security.