Each day recently I have woken up to see hacked Yahoo and Hotmail accounts of my friends and I hear about them when I meet with people on the street.

Each day their is spam in my various accounts – there is danger out there.

What to do? I recommend gmail – ask Google about it. If you like Yahoo and Hotmail – go for it but I did warn you.

Having your email account hacked is a terrible situation which might take a whole day to fix or convince you go back to the Royal Mail.

Prevention is better than cure

Most accounts are hacked for one of three reasons:

1. You did not secure your account with a strong password and a ‘dictionary attack’ allowed the hackers quick access. Use something like this: 6P321;dove – a series of numbers, letters and punctuation and upper and lower case
2. Your computer or another computer you used to access your emails was infected with malware or a virus or
3. You fell victim to a ‘phishing’ email that exposed your login details to cybercriminals
4. When you have trouble – use this time period to make safe – yourself for years but cleaning out your contact list and start with your real friends.
5. Don’t open emails from people you don’t know or they look funny.