The one thing most people completely underestimate is the value of their personal webmail accounts. You think your bank or web store is important? Well, have you ever noticed those oh-so-helpful "Forgot my password" functions? What do they do when you click that? They send you your password or they reset it at the least. Either way, if someone gets access to your e-mail account, they completely control everything you have on the Internet.

With access to someone's e-mail account, I can get to almost every other account they have online.

Besides the security risks, what about all your personal information? How many e-mails do you store online and how many years back do they go? Information about friends, family, business contacts; all things a bad guy who wants to do you harm could use.

Maybe you have a medical condition or a secret of some kind. Someone can use that for blackmail. What if they don't do anything that sinister and just impersonate you instead? If they send a virus from your account or scam your family into thinking you need money, chances are that your contacts will fall for it since it appears to have come from you.

That's why it's important to make sure that your e-mail account has one of your strongest passwords among your online accounts (if not THE strongest).

Read my passwords guide to learn what makes a good password and how to keep it safe!

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

My first thought is to be very cautious about using an online password checker to test the strength of your passwords because you might inadvertantly give away your password to a rogue site. However, this Microsoft sponsored password checker requires no logins or personal information and being that it's a fairly well-known company, chances are smaller that they would abuse the info if they even store it (which I can't imagine it being cost-effective to do so).