Dear LPG,

I was chatting with a friend the other day and she told me about yet another scam.  She told me that she recently received an email from one of her close friends who she knew was on holiday in France at the time, and it explained that he was in a bit of financial trouble and asked her to send him a relatively large sum of money electronically. The interesting thing was that bank details were included.

Though highly unlikely, and the sort of message that scams are made of, this came from the email address of a personal friend of hers.  So it starts; the ‘Should I, shouldn’t I’ dilemma.  Could he really be in trouble out there?

Her thinking was that if the situation was that bad, he would not be averse to receiving a call from her even though all this happened quite late into the night.  So she called and, predictably, he knew absolutely nothing about it.

But the real question is how did someone else get into his emails and would it have been so easy for whoever did this if my friend had logged out? 

We all do it these days.  It is generally accepted that your email app is just one of many that will appear on your smart phone home screen and, even though setting up the phone in the first place is often something that we older people get someone younger and more knowledgeable to do, your email address is just part of the process.

I took a look online to find out how you can get the thing to work without being signed in and, even though I didn’t understand all of what I read, it looks as if that option would result in a phone that would not work half as well.

We all know the importance of logging out, but so many more of us have tablets and smart phones where it is accepted that you don’t bother these days.

I strongly suggest that when Google make it hard to live without one of their email accounts, and even though it will result in yet another password to remember, it is a really good idea to have a second email account.

One that you always log out of as well as the one that is stuck on your phone.  Just changing the password is not the answer if the account is always logged in on your phone and there is one other advantage.  If you do this, you will also have an email address to give when you are being asked for one by some advertiser who you know will send you a load of junk mail, while you keep your important one little more junk free.

Signing in and out on your mobile is fiddly, but you can do it using your usual web browser and please don’t believe everything you read just because it came from your friend’s email address.

I am no expert but it’s worth thinking about…

KS, Crofton Park

KS shares some of the technical aspects of this subject…

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