I still use my first ever made email address, at this point it’s pushing 28 years old. However I have a major problem. I can rarely log into it anymore. There are so many attempts to login to the account daily from whoever out there that wants to gain access that the login is normally locked out for a period of time. At this point I’ve moved everything of financial value off of it as someone did get access once, but there are still plenty of random little things I’d like to hang on to it for.
I know I can just make a new one and ditch that one as a quick solution, but I figured i’d ask a wider community if they had any insights I might not have. It’s a Microsoft account, and my windows is tied to it, but I’m pretty sure I can just migrate that to something new.
Yeah so I had this as well. Every day or so I’d get locked out, had to do the sms unlock thing which sometimes wouldn’t work.
What I did is I added an alias to the account, made it the primary and removed login priviliges from the ‘old’ one.
For all the things you still use the address, it’ll be fine. It’s just MS based logins that’s you’d have to change.
Oh, so you are [email protected], I’m sorry
Fairly sure Gmail wasn’t around 28 years ago.
Which email provider is the account with?
This brings me memories from when I had my @hellokitty.com email.
Have you already tried adding an authenticator / passkeys, OP? Those are the only thing I can think of.
AFAIK consumer MS accounts don’t allow you to lock down access to a single IP. Adding MFA may help. If that doesn’t work, contact MS support and see if they can add a geolock to the account to only allow auth attempts from your country.
MS may also be able to change the email address then add your old one as an alias.
Do you log into your account using a web interface? I’d guess IMAP/SMTP isn’t limited by login attempts, only web logins. You could set up an email client on your devices and use it through that instead.
No matter what, I’d advise you to use a strong password, just to be safe.
I rotate my password every 6 months at this point. It’s about as secure as a human who wants to remember a password could be. It’s 20+ characters with all the various password needed inclusions.
And yeah, I can access it through an external application without issue. But if I ever want to change settings or make new email rules it becomes an issue.
You can use a password manager so you don’t have to remember it. And enable 2FA, shouldn’t really be possible for some rando to get into it, only well-resourced and organised attackers.
Then your best bet is switching to a new email.
Why not let that email get forwarded to another email account of yours ?
That is/was the plan, I was just wondering what insights people who actually know about privacy stuff would have overall. And I have been educated nicely thanks to a bunch of the folks on here.
