Forgot My Email ID Password, What To Do?

Advertisement

Emails have become important part of modern communication and are very important for work as well as personal life. Most of us maintain at least one email account with most working professionals with multiple email account. With the users who are not very frequent on using email tend to forget passwords. Also when we maintain multiple email accounts, it is imperative that we forget email id passwords for some or the other account. In case, you forget the password, there are multiple ways to retrieve email account passwords. In this article, we share with you some of the ways to retrieve your forgotten passwords and some best-practices you can follow so that it is easy to reset password in future if need arises.

Forgot Email Id Password

Password recovery methods vary from email service to service. Most web based email accounts like Gmail, Yahoo mail, rediffmail and hotmail etc. usually use an alternative email id which can be used to reset the password. Also many of these services have integrated a protection mechanism like security questions, SMS/text message verifications with the authorized mobile phone number etc. Lets looks at some of the general guidelines you should follow to reset your email account password.

Reset Password For Web-based Email Services Like Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail

If you have added a secondary email id while creating your email account, the password reset process becomes very simple. Most email services like Google (Gmail), Yahoomail, Hotmail and Rediffmail etc. offer resetting password by sending an email to your other email account. The only thing you need to take care of is that you should have access to your other email id and you may have to type in your alternative email id in full, so you must remember it correctly. Alternatively if you have added your mobile phone number to your email address, Gmail and many other services send you a text SMS on your phone to help you reset your password easily. Let me share with you some examples with Gmail and Yahoomail.

On the very login screen, there is usually a link which says “Forgot password” or  “Can’t access your account?” or “Reset password” or “Trouble signing in?” etc. Just lick on such link when you forget your password.

Forgot Gmail Account Password

Proceed with the requested information which is usually very simple and easy to follow with step-by-step procedure.

Gmail Password Reset Request

After you mention the required information, it takes you to the screen where you can initiate a password reset request.

Reset Password Request

In the below example, I have added my mobile number to the email account, so Gmail asked me to add my complete mobile number to reset my password. Alternatively, I can also click on link which says “Verify your identity” which will ask some security questions which have been setup during creation of the account.

SMS Reseting of password

Yahoomail also offers similar kind of password reset mechanism as you can see below:

Yahoo Mail Forgot Password

It asks similar kind of questions related to your Yahoomail account.

Yahoo Password Reset Screen

It also offers options to send password to alternative email address or sending Text SMS or asking security questions which can be used to reset the password information for Yahoo mail account.

Password Reset Options for Yahoo Mail

The procedure is more or less the same for most web-based email services including hotmail, rediffmail, Yahoo, Bing etc.

Reset Password For Private or Corporate Email Services Your Work Email Account

If you have a work email address which does not have alternate email id or SMS procedure to reset your password, there are different kind of authentications mechanisms to reset password in such cases. Most work email accounts are supported by an IT helpdesk team which can come very handy on a phone-call to help you reset your password. Many work email servers also allow to reset email password using security questions which is also another convenient way of resetting email account password. It may vary from service to service based on your work email policy. We suggest you simply call your authorized IT helpdesk for your company and seek help.

Reset Password For Own Domain Email Service

In case you have purchased a domain name and hosting account and are hosting your custom domain email address on your own, then the process to reset the email password is fairly simple. In such cases, the person who has the access to hosting server (we assume that you have the same if you have purchased a hosting account) can easily login to the hosting server.

Once you have logged into your hosting dashboard (which may look different from one below), locate email section and click on Email Accounts.

Own Hosting Email Accounts

Under email accounts, locate the email id for which you want to reset the password

Reset Email Password on own hosting

After your locate the email account, click on the link in front of it which says “Change password” and update the password.

Reset password for own hosted email

After this, you can login using the new password and get access to the email account for your self hosted email account.

Best Practices To Avoid Loosing Email Access or Password Hacking Vulnerability

  • Memorize your passwords well
  • Always add alternative email ids for services wherever its applicable
  • Always add mobile phone number for authentications wherever applicable
  • Always enter strong security questions whenever asked for while creating a new account
  • Don’t create unnecessary email accounts- well, it may sound blunt, but less is more when it comes to remembering passwords

We hope you find these tips simple and easy to follow. Do like us on Facebook for latest updates.

Tagged with 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title="" rel=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>