Email accounts are constantly being hacked around the world on a regular basis, and as many people use their email addresses for dozens of different websites, you're leaving yourself open to a lot of annoyance if you don't take the appropriate steps in order to secure your account.

Free email providers such as Hotmail, Yahoo & Gmail provide little security & support for password recovery. With the method I'm about to show you, you can make sure that your email address is secure.

Requirements:
A domain (you can buy domains for as little as £5)
A Gmail account

This is really simple to do.

Set up a Gmail account.

Sign up to a website such as NameCheap.com, although any domain hosting company that offers free email forwarding will do.

Set up an email on your domain that will forward to your Gmail account.

Then simply do NOT publish your Gmail account anywhere. When registering, or sharing your Email, provide your domain email account.

For example,
name@domain.com will forward your email to name@gmail.com.

When you own the domain, you have a lot more control. If your Gmail account ever does get compromised, simply change the forwarding through your NameCheap account.

The reason this is secure is because your domain email cannot be brute forced. It's not a pop3 box so there is no login password.

If you have any further questions with setting this up, PM me and I'll help you out.

I remember when Gmail used to be really small and the only way you could create an account is if you were refered from a friend not sure if it's the same anymore.

Also, you will find out it tends to be people you know who 'Hacks' your email account.

This is proberbly the most simple way of getting onto somebody's account, I try to login and obviously at this point I don't know your password and when it says 'Forgotten your password' It usually asks for an answer to a security question

If I then pop up and start talking to you about 'Pets' then when I say 'So what was the name of your first pet?' You tell me and there you go I just got access.

Where I pick any random question but I always know the answer, So it could be 'Name of your Mothers Maiden Name' Mine would be something daft like 'Red'

And then as Jack said, people start to Freeze accounts giving you the illusion that it's being hacked (As you won't be able to gain access) and then finally Brute Force it

But what Jack has mentioned on first post, is a really good tip to keeping things secure, espicially as most people will store pretty much everything on their emails.

The most popular way of hacking these days is Reverting. This is where the hacker gathers information on people, (which is actually very easy because people leave so much info about themselves on sites such as Facebook).

They then send a message to your email provider pretending to be you, asking for a password reset. Obviously the email provider would happily oblige... Why wouldn't they, if the hacker gives them all the correct details??

Think of it this way... On Facebook, you're pretty much forced into displaying your full name. You will most likely have your location on display, (or if you don't, a friend of yours will), you will most likely have your age, which is 1 step closer to your date of birth. If you have family members added as friends, that can be a goldmine for hackers.. Your email address may be on display.

Now lets say they had that info, and your email address.. A search around with your email address will uncover a lot of other accounts made with it, and possibly even more information that you might not have even known was readily available.

Next up all they need is your IP address... Sending you an email and awaiting for a reply can be enough for this...

Don't want to get you all totally paranoid, but people need to realize just how careful they need to be when posting stuff about themselves online.

Please, go hack my account, I can share my wonderful spam with you!