A valuable lesson learned about email accounts you don’t own
Q. I was recently laid off from my job of many years and I have lost access to my work email account. Unfortunately, I had associated many of my online accounts with that address. Now that I have lost access to the mail account, I can no longer manage my access for things like resetting my passwords. What can I do about this?
A. Let me say right off the bat that you should never tie anything to an email address that you don’t own outright.
This is true for things like work email accounts and university email accounts.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much that can be done once you lose access to the account.
You can try reaching out to the company or university to see if they can re-enable access temporarily while you get things sorted out. They may or may not be willing to help you.
Your bank or other financial institution accounts should be OK as you can call them and work with them to verify your identity and regain access.
Accounts like Facebook, Twitter and other social media services can be very difficult to contact to get things reset.
Whenever possible, link your private accounts to your own personal email. And as a backup, when possible, link them to your personal phone number.
This will help ensure that you don’t lose access to your personal online accounts should
you leave the organization that controls your email.
Q. I am getting a new Windows PC and am looking for a good way to transfer my data from my current computer to the new one. Do you have any suggestions?
A. Some computer migrations apps offer the ability to transfer applications and computer settings to a new PC. I don’t like to use those as I believe they can transfer underlying problems to the new PC.
For me, a new computer is a chance to start fresh. When I get a new computer, I start by just installing the applications I know I will need.
Then I use a USB hard drive to copy my documents, images and music from one computer to the new one.
It’s more time consuming, but I don’t end up porting over the clutter that builds up on a PC over time.
That being said, I have used LapLink PC Mover in the past and it seems to do a good job. You can find out more about their product at go.laplink.com.