Tech

EMAIL

James Flynn, Milborne Port Computers

Spring is finally here and, as I write, the schools are off for Easter which is historically a slightly quieter period for us but this year there appears to be a sudden burst of people spending money before the end of the tax year. The sleepless nights are less frequent with Lily and batteries are nearly recharged after our Covid and sickness bug session with older brother Harry.

We have been inundated with phone calls over the last month about email passwords, email outages and email hacking.

To set the record straight, every email account has a password. Now in most cases, you don’t need to enter that password every time you open your mail (via a program, app or internet browser) because you have it saved on your device, but you definitely have one. Whether you know it or not is a different matter. If I had £1 for every time someone said, ‘It could be…’ – well, you know the answer! If you haven’t changed your email password for a while or you know it isn’t particularly strong (i.e. welcome123 as BT used to reset it to this), then it may be worth changing it. When you change your email password you then must update or change that password on every device that you have your emails on like your PC, laptop or mobile. Most of the time you must do this twice – once for receiving and once for sending.

Our email host had a recent email outage. You’ll know this when you have a message asking you to continually enter your username and password, and we quickly realise this when our office phone rings, and everyone tells you the same thing! In this situation, with any provider, the best thing you can do is nothing. Close your email program and wait 15 minutes, open it and try again. Obviously, if you have changed your email password or this hasn’t been resolved in 24 hours, you know who to call.

An issue that is prominent at the moment, although has been around for a while is email hacking. Email’s get hacked or broken into in different ways and one of the hardest things for us is to try and explain or even find out how it happened. Unless you have given someone your password or they’ve guessed it, it’s most likely that the password has been compromised elsewhere or the host’s servers have been hacked. Once compromised the hackers try to get into other services/websites you use or try to use data within your email account against you. By this I mean finding a recent invoice or bill and editing the bank details to the hackers and resending it to the original recipient hoping they will pay to the new account. This starts a panic for the person that has been hacked and the company that the original invoice came from. If the money is wrongly paid and unless you have insurance the bank won’t give your money back. Hopefully, with the banks now matching account details it shouldn’t happen as much. Always think about the email that has been sent – if you think it’s a ‘weird’ one, it probably is!

I hope this has been helpful and if in doubt you know where to come.