Quote:
Originally Posted by demonix
unlike yahoo who allowed someone from Egypt to run amok in my backup yahoo mail account sending spam to anyone they wanted and only left me with a small notification that I might have missed.
|
Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail are notoriously insecure because they enable hackers to change the password on the account over the web. There are YouTube tutorials on how to hijack a Yahoo mail account. As someone who manages an e-mail listserver for my college classmates, I've seen half-a-dozen accounts be hijacked in this way over the past couple of years.
GMail can be configured so that a password change requires that a confirmation code be sent as a SMS text message to a cell phone, or emailed to an account other than the one in question. That makes it very much harder to compromise GMail accounts. I wouldn't use any other free email service myself, though all my real mail is delivered to a Linux server sitting in my home.