Another reason NOT to use free webmail service
I received 6 e-mail messages a couple of days ago from a friend that I haven’t spoke to for a long time. At first I thought it was some forwarded junks, since it all began in the subject with the 3 magical letters and a colon (Fwd: ). Giving her some benefit of doubt, I decided to open up one of them and check out the mail’s content.
To my big surprise 
, the mail turned out to be forwarded extracts of her e-mail conversation with other people. In all 6 of it, contains steamy conversation between this long lost friend of mine and the men she casually sleeps and other encounters of such kind. These conversations took place between the year 2000 and 2001 and was forwarded (I assume) to the list of people in her e-mail account address book (that’s how I get a copy of it, I reckon).
Don’t think all these forwarding were actually made by my friend. I reckon someone close to her (jealous ex-bf or someone who really hate her) jacked into her Hotmail mailbox and forwarded out such mails as an attempt to humiliate her in front of the people listed in the address book.
I wish I could call her up and find out what’s going on, but alas, we lost phone contact already as she changed her number. The last time we met was in Bangsar when I had a small reunion gathering with the old classmates of BB (she was then the girlfriend of an old classmate, in which they broke up shortly after). I knew her back in 2001 (or late 2000) while working on an event for my company in the centrestage of Suria KLCC.
What can I conclude here? Besides the tremendous amount of spam you get from free webmail services like Hotmail and Yahoo, it’s still a good idea to avoid using a free webmail service. Like from this example, we learn that the flexibility of keeping our old mails in the (there’s only a tiny amount of storage space on the server anyway) server and accessible from everywhere is not without its cons.
Someone who knows your password (jealous ex-partners and spouse or people you thought you can really trust) can just go in and create helluva havoc like the above by going thru your old saved messages and sent messages and distributing it easily to your readily-available list of friends with a few easy clicks.
Others might just be happy to sniff thru your mails every now and then passively (so you might as well change password now before your sniffer changes it!).
Oh yeah, for those of you still using your free webmail account as correspondance in your resume/CV/ when applying for jobs (especially tech jobs), I suggest you go get yourself a real ISP e-mail account instead. One which is referring you with your real name instead of i_am_handsome143@hotmail.com as such trivial e-mail address doesn’t seem professional and doesn’t reflect that you’re indeed serious about getting a job 
September 1st, 2003 at 11:09 am
Actually, this entry sounds more like “Another reason NOT to share your password with loved ones”, instead of citing another reason not to use free webmail services. Given the close proximity of the person who hacked her account, it would have stood an equal chance of happening even if the email was kept on an ISP account.
Personally, I am quick to badmouth Yahoo or Hotmail, but I do believe that there are some fabulous free email services out there that work for me, especially http://www.fastmail.fm.
I’ve been scouring all over the net to see whether there would be a few email hosts who would clean up the bad name of spam-filled free services, and there are quite a few, such as inbox.net and fastmail.fm. To go on further would make me sound like an ad, so I won’t.
At any rate, I feel dreadfully sorry for that friend of yours. It must take a lot of hatred to actually do something with the email you hack to read.
September 1st, 2003 at 11:17 am
But seriously, I do think it’s extremely easy to gain access to lost password (due to the high level of anonymity when signing up) with some trivial question. Some you can even just try contacting Customer Service of the e-mail service provider with some good social engineering skills and you’ll get a password reset by them.
September 1st, 2003 at 11:21 am
I agree with feirith. There are pros and cons to having a free webmail account, but in this era of worms/viruses/malicious trojans, how can you be sure that your ISP is really safe?
I think the one factor that would sway me immediately in favour of free webmail would be that attachments stay dormant, without you having to open it to see what’s inside. Considering that ISPs in Malaysia haven’t reached a level of security we’re comfy with (and not everyone can afford to buy a domain or get an account from a new ISP) for now, webmail is an alternative we just can’t ignore.
September 1st, 2003 at 12:00 pm
Although mails and its attachments are downloaded into the local PC for non-webmail accounts, it’s still up to the user to open it or not…
It takes a lil’ education to remind one not open up suspicious attachments…
September 1st, 2003 at 6:54 pm
I agree. However, sometimes, like in the case of Outlook (which the majority of people are using) there IS no choice.
Click on an email, and the message springs open, this goes true for attachments. Howsoever bad Yahoo is with spamming (strangely, it’s never been like that with my account), it’s still one of the better webmail services out there. Wish I could say the same about Hotmail, though. Thank God they upgraded the password procedure. In my younger days I’d break into random inboxes for fun, naughty me.
And I reiterate: not everyone can afford an ISP based account..and the ISPs themselves have to step up security, before we can entrust our inboxes to them.
September 8th, 2003 at 10:06 pm
Well, it’s a risk one have to take i guess… it’s pretty easy to crack into a Hotmail account (not too long ago i did read a full tutorial on a computing forum) but i think Microsoft have patched up the security exploits.
On ISP account at least you’re paying for it thus they have to maintain some kind of standard, if not they can be sued or questioned about their server’s integrity… so ISP is still preferred compared with free e-mail (if you asked me).
Free e-mail is good for one thing though… when you’re signing up for other services or filling up forms (use them) ’cause they usually get spammed and you can just ignore the mailbox.
Hahaha! Just IMHO….