Why You Need to Login to All of Your Secondary Email Accounts Regularly
Many of us now have multiple email addresses set up, and in this day and age it’s practically necessary if you want to maintain some control over your messages: one email account to sign up for, one for the important people in your life, one for that side hustle: one for newsletters, one as a backup, and so on.
These secondary (or tertiary or quaternary) email addresses can come in handy when you sign up for new accounts—you need to sign up for an account for everything from smart home devices to language learning apps these days. Moreover, they are often used as backup email addresses to return to your account.
You know the drill: you enter your email address and a code or link will be sent to it in case your account is ever locked for any reason (forgotten password is common). You could very well specify something other than your primary email address for this, but then it’s all too easy to forget about those backup mailboxes.
However, this recovery email account will become important if you ever need to return to an application or website, so it should not be neglected.
Checking email accounts for recovery
If any of your accounts use a recovery process that includes an email address, you need to check that email address regularly, even if it’s one that you don’t actually use. As we said earlier , inactive mailboxes can be deleted if they are inactive for a long period of time, which can be a problem if you have nowhere to send account recovery links.
Beyond simply keeping your email account active, checking it regularly means you’ll detect unauthorized attempts to break into your accounts. You don’t want to log into a sub account for the first time in six months and find that hackers are trying to access something important every day – if you’re aware of it, you can take further steps to prevent it. .
One way to make sure you don’t miss messages from your secondary account is to import them into your main account. For example, in the web version of Gmail, you can click the gear icon (top right), then “View all settings” and “Accounts” and “Import” to connect other accounts (you can even apply filters to these imported messages to they didn’t clutter your inbox). there are too many inboxes).
It is recommended that you regularly check the email addresses that you have actually registered in your accounts. For example, in your Facebook account on the web, click your profile picture (top right), then Settings & Privacy and Settings . Click View More in Account Center , then Personal Information and Contact Information . Other accounts will have similar settings pages that you can check.
Securing Backup Email Accounts
As mentioned above, new messages sent to these recovery email addresses can alert you if someone is trying to break into your accounts: social media, banking, cloud storage, or anything else. If this person is also able to log into your recovery email account, you could quickly find yourself blocked.
With this in mind, it is imperative that your backup email addresses are looked after in the same way as your primary ones from a security standpoint. If an email address is somehow related to the recovery of one of your accounts, it’s just as important as any other—you shouldn’t just assume that you’ll never have to use the associated recovery process.
When it comes to protecting those accounts, here’s the usual checklist: Set up two-factor authentication whenever it’s offered, use a strong, unguessable, and unique password, and be careful with the apps, sites, and browser extensions you connect to your accounts. e-mail. Make sure your email address is properly disabled from older devices that you no longer use.
These security settings shouldn’t be hard to find in your account, but we’ll use Yahoo on the web as an example. If you click your name (top right), then Account Information and Security , you’ll find plenty of useful options under that tab (you can also set up a recovery email address on the same screen).