My most frequently asked question is…

I reveal the single, most frequently asked question at Ask Leo! these days, and discuss the ramifications.

Transcript

Hello everyone, this is Leo Notenboom of Ask Leo, on the internet at askleo.info, with news, commentary and answers to some of the many questions I get at askleo.info.

Can you guess the most frequently asked question on Ask Leo?

I field tons of questions every day on Ask Leo! and they run the range from detailed hardware oriented issues to questions around spyware and virus problems, windows applications behaviour, 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 1? 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?”

The answer, by the way, is no.

Hot topics come and go for many reasons, but this one’s stuck around for some time. A lot of people seem to have trouble with Hotmail.

My first reaction, of course, is to think that it’s mostly kids – perhaps they shared their password with a friend or relative who turned out to be less than trustworthy. While I’m certain that’s happened, it turns out that attempting to change passwords is one way that many people are trying to deal with problems logging in, in the first place – I’ve received lots of reports of people being unable to access Hotmail for a variety of reasons. In the process of attempting to change their passwords, folks either get locked out, loose the password, forget their secret question, or simply give up in frustration.

Sadly, a very common plea with this question is that the user has all of their contacts, their business contacts, in their Hotmail address book. I’ve ranted before on whether or not free email accounts are appropriate as the sole repository for critical email and information -they’re not.

The lesson that I take away from all this is simple: we have a long, long way to go in keeping the internet safe and secure if so many people are still using it in inappropriate and insecure ways.

And we have a lot of education to provide.

This is article 5744 – for related links, or to leave a comment, go to askleo.info, enter 5744 in the go to article number box in the upper right. Add your comments to the discussion, I’d love to hear from you.

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