Your Password is:

Months ago, I read that our email accounts present a much greater security risk than we might assume. If someone gets access to your saved emails, they are likely to find many passwords to your other accounts. This is not exactly our fault; some companies will email us reminders of the password we selected. (A properly encrypted website should not even KNOW your password; they should only know how to verify it.)

When I read this advice, my heart sank. I searched my saved email for 'password' and got about 200 hits. I wanted to sanitize all those emails; how long would it take?

This morning I did the job, and it took over an hour. There are now NO current passwords in my saved email. The job was a bit tricky. I could not just delete all emails containing the word 'password'. Many of these emails contained no actual password, and some of them contained info I really needed to save. In a few rare cases, I needed to copy the password info somewhere else (I'm not saying where!) for safekeeping.

In one way, this process was shocking. I got to see just how many websites I have registered at: wow... In many cases, I had forgotten all about them, and I even marveled that I had once been interested enough to register for them. Well, they're gone now, as far as I'm concerned.