Monitor Old Email Addresses

After working at my first “real” job for about a year, I started looking for another job. Obviously, I needed to use a personal email address to send resumes and apply for jobs, and I opted to create a more professional sounding Hotmail account rather than using the AOL email account I had used since high school.

Although I don’t really use that account anymore, I want to keep it because it’s my name, and I’d rather have it than someone else.. I generally try to log in to that account once or twice a year to keep it active and prevent someone else from taking control of it.

I logged in to my account for the first time in probably a year, and I was informed by Hotmail that the account had been compromised. Apparently, someone had sent spam emails from the account, which I was able to confirm by checking the sent messages box. I immediately changed the password and took control of the account.

Many of us have more than one email address. Sometimes they are used to make offers on domain names or used for other reasons. Whatever the case may be, you should monitor those email addresses often. Fortunately, most of the contacts I have in that account are old head hunters and people with whom I emailed 5+ years ago. However, it would have looked bad had they been current business contacts.