My most frequently asked question.
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for
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So I've been doing Ask Leo for a while.
I'm coming up on 20 years worth of it.
And as part of that, I have been looking at some of my older
content to see what still applies and cleaning it up, that stuff.
I ran across a podcast episode from 2005,
so I'd been doing Ask Leo for just two years.
The episode basically highlighted what at that time
was the most common question I was getting.
Here's what I said.
I field tons of questions every day on Ask Leo and they run the range
from detail, hardware oriented issues to questions around spyware and virus
problems, Windows applications behavior, networking, email, and much more.
Right now, there are over 500 questions
and answers up on the site with more being added daily.
So what's number one?
What's the most frequent question I get these days?
The question I get asked most often is
this, can you recover my hotmail password for me?
Now, that was 18 years ago, and at the time that actually became
a running joke between myself and some of my friends.
But it was very much true.
Hotmail password recovery was the number one topic of
The number one question that I kept getting over and over and over again.
Fast forward 18 years to today, 2023.
What is my number one question today?
Can you recover my email Facebook password for me.
Now, to be clear, I'm not getting that exact question
because one of the neat things that's happening is that rather than 500
articles, I've got more like 5,000 articles.
I think it's 5,500.
People are finding the answer
to that question and the variations thereof themselves.
So what's that really being based on is the traffic to the site.
Which are my most popular articles?
What are the most popular videos and so forth?
And in fact, they all come down to password loss, account recovery.
In fact, let me read you some
of the article titles because you'll see that there's actually a modern twist.
How do I access email without phone verification?
Lost email account recovery with no phone or alternate email.
How do I recover my email without my recovery email or phone?
How do I access email without phone verification?
Nine things to try.
Absolutely, people are having trouble
getting into their Gmail account these days.
But the modern twist is that the reason they're having trouble,
the reason they're unable to regain access is because they don't have their recovery
information set up or they have it set up and it's gotten out of date.
So with that as the backdrop, what are my two takeaways from all this?
This is 18, actually 20 years now of account recovery, account loss.
What is the big take away? I have two.
One, Google and Microsoft and Yahoo and all
the other free account providers really need to invest in customer service.
By that I mean, if you've lost your account, you need to talk to someone.
You need to have someone who can
independently verify whatever information they may have available to them that you
are you and should be allowed back into your account.
That's expensive.
I get that.
Hiring people to do that costs money.
But honestly, I'm not sure that that's the reason they're not doing it.
The real risk is that people are fallible.
By that, I mean that as soon as real customer support personnel
are applied to the problem, then the hackers come out.
What are they going to do?
They're going to try to fool the customer
service representatives into handing over your account.
That is probably worse
than not being able to access your account, at least from Google's
perspective, at least from Microsoft's perspective.
They would rather have you lose your
account completely than give it to a hacker by mistake.
Nonetheless, I still believe
that the right answer for this problem today would be for Google and the other
free service providers to actually invest in customer support.
Accounts are being lost daily and people have no recourse.
There should be recourse.
Now, having said that, my second take away.
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, the other free account providers, you know what?
They're not going to do any of that.
They just aren't.
As much as we might want them to, it ain't going to happen.
So what does that mean?
It means that we have the responsibility to be prepared.
What does that mean?
That means account security, of course.
Strong passwords, unique passwords, two factor authentication,
all the things we do to secure our account normally, and making absolutely certain
that the recovery information is not only present but up to date.
That means the email address you may have
associated with your account, make sure you can still access it.
The phone number that's associated
with that account, make sure you still have that number.
Accounts are lost daily, mostly because
people set up recovery information years ago when they created the account and now
they no longer have access to that old email account or that old phone number.
And as a result, when it comes time to recover their account, they can't.
They're locked out forever.
And unfortunately,
what I also hear is that people lose years of valuable information because
it's all in this account and it's only in this account.
Now, Google has done a good job of basically
providing us with some really cool services.
Same is true for Microsoft, same is true for the others.
We've all come to rely on those services.
As a result, we have a lot of information in those services,
a lot of information that is at risk if we lose access to the account we're using.
Which brings up another point, another part of being prepared.
Back it up.
Seriously, I harp on backups all the time.
And this is another case where I cannot overstate the importance.
If you have information in, say,
your Google account and that account were to go away instantly
without warning and without hope of recovery, would that be a problem?
If that's a problem,
you haven't been backing up your data, you haven't been backing up whatever
the heck it is you've got in your Google account.
Start doing that today.
Don't delay.
As much as we might want
the organizations, the services to basically do a better job
of helping us regain access to our accounts, it ain't going to happen.
It just isn't.
That means you and I need to keep our account secure,
keep the recovery information up to date and back up the information we care about.
For updates, for comments, for related links and more, visit
Askleo.com/130613.
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Askleo.com.
Thanks for watching.