Make Sure to Update Your Recovery Emails

When you forget your password, or otherwise lose access to an account, a recovery email can help you get back up and running. While it might feel safe to set it and forget it, you would benefit from routinely updating your recovery emails, especially if you have many different accounts to manage.

When you attempt to gain access to your account without the password, a service will usually send a recovery link to your connected recovery email. Sometimes, this email address is the one attached to the account; other times, it’s a separate email used only for recovering accounts.

The issue here is two-fold. One side of the problem concerns old emails. If you set an email address for an account, but no longer use that email, it’s possible you’ll lose access to that account as well. After all, we have many of our accounts for years without needing to recover them; in that time, we might get a new email address, and lose access to the old one.

In such a case, you lose your main path to recovering the original account.

The second side of the problem concerns security; it’s possible in the time you set this recovery email, someone gained access to that account. Any account that uses that email address as a recovery account would then be compromised, since the bad actor has access to the recovery links sent to the email address.

Making sure your recovery emails are up to date is a great way to ensure that you can always access your accounts, while locking out everyone else.

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