April 17, 2012 When [my wife] came back to her desk, half an hour later, she couldn't log into Gmail at all. By that time, I was up and looking at e?mail, and we both quickly saw what the real problem was. In my inbox I found a message purporting to be from her, followed by a quickly proliferating stream of concerned responses from friends and acquaintances, all about the fact that she had been "mugged in Madrid." The account had seemed sluggish earlier that morning because my wife had tried to use it at just the moment a hacker was taking it over and changing its settings -- including the password, so that she couldn't log in again. ... The greatest practical fear for my wife and me was that, even if she eventually managed to retrieve her records, so much of our personal and financial data would be in someone else's presumably hostile hands that we would spend our remaining years looking over our shoulders, wondering how and when something would be put to damaging use. At some point over the past six years, our [email] correspondence would certainly have included every number or code that was important to us -- credit card numbers, bank-account information, medical info, and any other sensitive data you can imagine. Now get everyone you know to read it, too. Please. It's for their own good. Your email is the skeleton key to your online identity . When you lose control of your