Email / Online Security

[InsaneNutter]

I’m interested to know how you all manage your email, do you have just one account? Or multiple accounts for various different things?

At the moment I have one hotmail account that I’ve used for just about everything over the last 8 years. Not all but a lot of the sites ive signed up with have the same password I use to access the email account, I must admit this has bothered me for quite a while but I’ve never really done anything about it as I generally only signup to website I can trust which my main email address.

I was thinking about buying domain and using that for my email, that way I can have it powerd by Windows Live Domains, Google Apps or even host it myself, in the future this would allow me to change email provider without creating a new email address if i wished.

If I do this I was planning to have two separate email accounts, an email account for social stuff like email from friends, MSN, Facebook and forums.
I was also thinking of having a separate email account for stuff like online banking, Paypal, eBay, online shops and so on.

Does that sound a bit too paranoid? Ive just been thinking a lot more about security since taking a secure and forensics module as part of my course this year.

I would be interested to know how you guys manage your email / online accounts anyway.

 

[Assassin]

I'm the same as you, been using the same hotmail address for years. Also using the same password for almost everything, which I know isn't very safe. About a year ago I had a very easy password but at least I changed that into just some random line of letters, numbers, etc. I'd like to be more safe and have multiple passwords, but I can't be bothered having to remember them all.

 

[Icharus_Falling]

im the same, but i change the password when its anything that i gave my credit card info for. otherwise, whats anybody gonna do with your info?

 

[KillerWhiteMan]

I have had the same e-mail account for years. It gets hard to manage if you have multiple accounts and passwords in my opinion.

 

[Nimrod]

I have one email account which I use for everything now, I use to have two (ISP and Personal) and send important stuff to my ISP one and for online sites unimportant my Personal Gmail. Now days Iv switched everything to my one account, a Gmail.

I found managing multiple accounts annoying, I ended up forwarding all of them into one in the end, which made having them all pointless. Now that I use just Gmail, I take advantage of tags in emails so when signing up to forums I entered my email address username+forums@gmail.com, then when email arrives in my username, it autolabels it as forums and hides it from the Inbox (rule I set up).

With regards to passwords, I have a master one I use for important stuff, like banks and stuff, then a basic one I use on every other site that I dont trust so much, but I want to remember my password for.