Several years ago, when I was in college, I setup a gmail account to use on the top of my resume for hiring mangers to contact me. I created that account on a whim and never really expected to use it. At the time I still had an AOL account and a .edu account that I used for all of my email needs.
Fast forward nearly a decade and that gmail account slowly became my primarily email account. I started using the account for personal emails, but then opened it up as my registration email address for everything. Banking, loyalty programs, social media, utility accounts, you name it, I use the same email address. Worse than that, many of those accounts also have similar passwords. This means that if someone knows my email and password combo, they could potentially have access to everything. Obviously, this is an issue and one that I’ve been meaning to correct for well over a year now.
Thankfully, given the current situation in the U.S. I finally had a few spare evenings to do some spring cleaning. After rearranging my apartment, dusting, vacuuming, and dusting again… and again, and again, I decided to finally tackle cleaning up my online presence.
Online Banking Profiles Email Account
I started this account cleanup process with my online banking accounts. I started by creating a new email address that is entirely different than my primary email account. What’s more, I’ve avoided linking those two accounts in any way.
After creating the new email address I then logged onto all of my accounts and assigned the new email as my primary email address. I then quickly changed all of those account passwords to something entirely different than what they’ve been historically.
This entire process took just under 30 minutes as most banks and credit card issuers make profile changes incredibly easy. The most frustrating part of this whole process were the confirmation emails from the various financial institutions. From each, I received confirmation of account activity emails to both email accounts for all of the accounts linked to the email addresses. In total, this was something like 30 emails in the span of 30 minutes. Overall, it’s a fairly small price to pay for the (hopefully) added security.
Loyalty Program Email Account
Following the lead of online banking, I’ve also decided to create an entirely new email address for my loyalty program profiles. Again, I’m doing this to help keep everything fairly separate in the event of a data breach. However, I’m also doing this because I want to keep all of my travel emails separate from my personal emails.
I currently get about 10-15 emails a day from various loyalty programs with offers, updates, and promotions. I love these emails because it allows me to see what is going on with each program and potentially gives me a topic to write about, but it clutters my inbox. My goal with this new email address is to keep all of that information separate from my personal inbox. This way, when I log into my primary email account I’ll only see emails from friends, family, etc.
Another reason I chose to make this change with my loyalty accounts is that my personal email is incredibly long. Over time, I grew tired of tired of reading out my entire email address when doing anything over the phone. Instead, I wanted a more simple email address that is a short combination of a word and some numbers that’s easy to relay over the phone. Hopefully this will resolve the often painful exchange of reciting the phonetic alphabet anytime I’m providing my email address.
Why Make These Changes
The primary motivation for making these changes was all of the recent data breaches. It seems like every few days we hear about another massive data breach of 5 million, 10 million, etc. accounts being compromised. In a lot of these data breaches the hackers actually gain access to usernames, email addresses, and passwords. That information is then shared with others online and can be used to access other accounts.
Final Thoughts
What I’ve outlined above is something I’ve been meaning to do for about a year now. I like the idea of keeping all of my banking separate from everything else. Likewise, I like knowing that my loyalty program accounts are separate from other accounts as well.
Going forward, if there is a data breach with a loyalty program, I’ll only have to monitor my loyalty program email address. Similarly, if a bank experiences a data breach I’ll then only have to worry about my banking profiles. Hopefully, separating my accounts this way will help me stay protected following future hacks.
Lastly, I’m excited to finally reclaim my personal email account. For far too long that account has been flooded with offers, promotions, and activity notices. Finally I’ll go back to the time when all that hit that account is messages from friends, family, and colleagues.
