Regarding Emails and Security

[Charre]

When using Gmail, the inbox doesn't show more than a certain amount of emails that have been read. After some time I had just assumed Gmail deletes the excess emails. This is NOT the case, so for most of 3 years at least, emails have been piling up containing various things about my life. Had someone taken over my Gmail account entirely, they could have known almost everything about me including purchase history. I have since purged as many emails as possible from my inbox, I have found an email from 2016. That's FOUR years worth of info that was at risk had my account been compromised entirely. I had deleted over two thousand emails from my inbox in one session.

Do not make a similar mistake: keep no more than twenty read emails in your inbox. if you MUST keep more, put them into a custom category. Remember that anything over a month old could be relatively useless to you, while containing info you don't want shared.

In addition: change your passwords as necessary.

My account is still in my own hands but not everyone may be that fortunate with the amount of cyber attacks that happen each year.

[Vultima]

I'm so confused, you thought your emails would delete themselves, that would be the worst feature ever, it will retain everything, unless you tell it not to, or set up email rules to delete things after x amount of days.

This "someone" you refer to is probably more of a "something" - aka a bot trying email/passwords combinations all day.

Using https://haveibeenpwned.com/ on the email you used to register on the forum, I can see your email address is involved in 2 breaches, there could be more than aren't displaying there.  So if you have been using the same password on any of those sites that you also used on your gmail - thats how they got in.

 

Also - RE: Deleting your emails, after they already have access will do nothing.  They will not be using the gmail client, chances are they have already downloaded every email in your account, just as your PC would do if you use a mail client e.g. Windows mail/outlook/Mac Mail.

 

Unless whoever controls the bot has a vested interest in you, nothing will come of it, the bot will scan your emails for payment details and the like, look for logins/passwords, scrape your entire contact list, then repeat the cycle of trying to do it them.  This is entirely automated.

[Charre]

Thanks for the information
the "someone" was a hypothetical at the time, though I can clearly see now it was a bad decision to play "everybody edits"