What if you lose your GMAIL password?

When Google crippled me for a day!

I was on GTALK yesterday afternoon, when I received a scrap note from a friend.I tried logging to Orkut, and found that it wasn’t allowing me, and it kept on saying my password was wrong for my account. Was I sleepy? I went to the washbasin and sprinked some water and went back to my computer to login again..and damn it didn’t actually allow me to login. I tried the same with Blogger and GMAIL and the results the same.

I went to the “forgot Password” link and quickly answered my password question, and also changed the password. I suspect somebody had got into my MAIL account and has changed my PASSWORD, that’s why I was not able to log in.

After changing the password, I tried logging into Orkut, and it would still not allow me inside !!!. I was peeved and wondered what exactly was happening. I kept trying my new password and it did not work. Now this really scared me, as from my GTALK widget, I was not able to login to my GMAIL and every possible way of logging into Google services failed me.I was now worried and was getting skeptical of what password I had changed a minute ago. When I changed my password, my mind gave me a million different potential tough passwords out of which one was selected. I was in doubt whether I typed any of the other passwords and that confusion ate me for the next one hour.

By the way, if you feel, when there is a secondary email address why worry? Then, you need to know one more piece of data. My secondary email address at hotmail, no longer existed and I never bothered to worry about a potential security problem. Now what was I to do? I felt like an orphaned child in the midst of a flash flood, or a lone survivor in a flight crash.All my Google data was gone, as Google would help me only in 1 possible way.That would be only possible if the hacker was inactive for 5 days, and which hacker would hack an id to leave it inactive? So there I was, staring at a bleak future...with all my data gone….just gone…Chole go chey, poye pochu…..the olden days IODEX ad just teased me in my mind. There was a mini catastrophe going on

In the midst of this tension, I had ignored requests for nature’s call, and I decided I may as well do that. Some times you start hearing music and strange songs in your mind when you are in the toilet.This time, I was in no mood for my mind to go haywire.Once I had finished passing urine, I felt refreshed and a sense of ease.It just made me feel better.

I went back to my computer and said to myself that the 2nd time password limit was a 8 character word and I knew I would have to potentially test out 8! Cases to figure out my password..actually even more if one also add numerical characters(typically (26*2*9) to the power 8 times..but I did not let math disappoint me.I tried to recollect combinations of my password and much to my surprise, I realized that whatever I had thought was different and typed was a keystroke away and this was explored in the 19th such attempt…and was I gleaming with joy…I was over the moon.

The next thing I did was to locate the secondary email address tab and change it to a different known id.If I did not locate my password, as per GOOGLE’s privacy policy, they wouldn’t help you in anyway. So be very careful about anything you do electronically.In fact, this post is the second time I am writing this, as I lost the content, when I typed the article directly on the Blogger editor. So in case you found this a useful read, do keep your back ups and password logic somewhere, where you can find it in an emergency…You never know when you would need what….I thought Google was the safest way of storing a friends phone number, a PAN number or some damn thing.If its on line, then I am fine…but sometimes overdependence on Online can kick you in the wrong place. BACK UP’S ARE DEADLY IMPORTANT….

People who learn from their mistakes are wise
People who learn from others mistakes are wiser…

Get Wiser!