Your Email Password Is Critical

March 4th, 2013
email, passwords, tech
When you forget a password, what do you do? You click "forgot password", they send a link to your email, and you enter a new password, right? [1] Which means that if someone can get into your email they can get into anything. Sites get hacked and lose passwords all the time, so if you share passwords between sites it's really worth it to have a separate one just for your email.


[1] For me about half the time when I see the "your password must have one capital letter, two numbers, ..." I remember the password I used. I wish people would put the password creation restrictions on signin pages. Invisible at first, but showing up as a help message once you enter your password wrong once.

Referenced in: Screwing up unsubscription

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Effective altruism and PR

I. The “effective altruists should be more concerned about PR” brigade has been out in full force on X recently.

via Thing of Things October 8, 2026

There's no point at which turning your brain off will work

In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs1. They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked2. This generally didn't work in early 2025 and the result was …

via Posts on September 18, 2026

My Weirdy Creatures

Over the last few days, I've been working on some little creatres. But they're very weird. I call them "weirdy creatures". I've made quite a lot of them, I think maybe 5-6, not sure. Weirdy Predator This is a weirdy predator. They'…

via Anna Wise's Blog Posts September 13, 2026

more     (via openring)