- Your email password is easily guessable
- You entered your email password into a phishing website
- Your email service provider had a security breach
- Your hacked email account used the same or very similar password as a different, breached site
Should this happen to you, you need to immediately do the following:
- Change your email password
- Change other passwords if they were the same or similar to your former email password
- Change any passwords that were contained in old emails
- Check your email settings so that the hijacker hasn’t defined an automatic email forwarder
- Notify your contacts that your email was hijacked and should they receive a strange email seemingly coming from you, not to open it without checking with you first
You may also notice that after all of this, legitimate emails you send out are not deliverable and get bounced. This is due to your email account having been blacklisted in the Internet because of being detected as a spammer. Normally this resolves itself after about 24 hours, but is obviously very annoying.