A few times a year someone will send me a desperate message saying that their email has been hacked! What should they do??!!
Let me tell you right now: your email has (probably) not been “hacked.” Your email account is probably still secure, though of course you can change your email password whenever you are concerned. Just make sure to that your email password is unique (not one you use elsewhere) and long (make it an uncommon phrase with some numbers sprinkled in).
What has happened? Why are your friends getting email from you that you did not send? Why are they sending you warnings that your email has been hacked?
Nothing has “happened” and you have not been “hacked”. Email is just being email. Let me explain.
Think of email as a postcard. A postcard travels through the mail in a way that anyone can read it. Anyone could send a postcard of Paris and put your return address on it, telling everyone what a wonderful trip you’ve been having. You don’t have to send the postcard, they can. You don’t have to write the post card, they can. You won’t even have any idea that your friends think you are in Paris until they start writing back to you saying, “oh, pick up a baguette for me while you are there.”
When you get messages from your friends asking about Paris, you don’t panic and think, “someone has robbed my house!” You don’t worry that they got into your mailbox. You just shrug and say, “hey, that was a postcard, anyone could have written it. That wasn’t even my handwriting.” You understand how easy it is to fake a postcard.
Well, email is even easier to fake. And since it does not even have hints like your handwriting or the stamp or the postmark, it is even harder for your friends to recognize the forgery. Email travels in the open, it is insecure by nature, and it can be forged by anyone without any access to your mailbox. Just like a postcard.
So sure, change your email password every now and then. Make it strong and unique. But also know that email is always, by its very nature suspicious. If something looks like it comes from a friend, but what it turns out to be is a weirdly generic Punchbowl invitation to a party in Nigeria, just ignore it. Throw it away. No need to send a warning to your friend, they did not send it. Just be a skeptical consumer of email.
Remember, email is a postcard.