What can people do if they have your email address?

That depends in part on who your provider is. The biggest danger is that many places use your email addy as your user name. This means having your email addy gives them half the access they need for example to have a go at getting at your banking records. If you use a simple password there is a real danger. Do not use whole words, personal data like birth dates, names of relitives/friends/pets as a password. Always mix numbers or uppercase chars with letters. Never use a purely numeric or alphabetic password.

If your email provider is a local ISP they can locate what town you live in. In the old days a utility called finger would actually dig up quite a bit of info. If you have a static IP there still might be detailed info availible on you. This does not apply to web based email like Yahoo. Most ISPs block finger requests nowdays. I was able to stop a man from harrassing a woman once back in the early 90s by fingering him and calling him to discuss the problem. All of this I got from just an email addy.

As pointed out your name could be sold to spammers or used as the return address of spammers. That is worse since many places still use black lists and your email addy could be permanently blocked from sending mail to whole companies because a spammer used it to spoof. Worse if the password is easy to crack a hacker might take over your email addy and use it as part of hacking attempts. If you use Internet Explorer or Outlook to read your email you are especially vulnerable to this. Every month it seems a new exploit comes out which allows a hacker to send you s specially crafted message, which if you open it will then give the hacker control over your machine. Firefox has fewer of these vulnerabilities and they are usually addressed quicker when they happen. The danger is significant if you do online banking and or bill pay. Switching to Firefox for web browsing and a different email client such as Thunderbird or Evolution will greatly decrease your risks of getting hacked

in such a way. Outlook is known as Outbreak in the computer security circles because of Outlook's constant and severe security problems. Use that only as a last resort option until you can get a better email client.

Do a search on your email address. You might be surprised how much somebody could learn about you. Many web pages are created by ametuers with no idea how to block web spiders from sensitive areas. This means that a well meaning volenteer in a club or organization you belong too could be broadcasting quite a bit of detail about you. Details that sometimes include physical address, hobbies, interests, associations, phone number and other sensitive details. Most people will turn up nothing. Mine for example turned up a page from an online game I used to play and a membership page at a fantasy baseball site. Searching on another of my email addys turned up answers to Linux questions, a submission to a lyrics site, and two other pages of info. So an enemy or stalker could learn quite a bit about a person from just their email addy if you are quite active on the web. What I tend to do is use a couple email addys for high profile stuff such as memberships to public areas, online games and other unimportant stuff. Then I have about four email addys I use for memberships to more sensitive accounts and for good friends and other important email. This reduces risks and makes it easier to find email I really want to read as my public email addys are the ones sold to spam lists and lifted by spammer's web spiders from careless web designers.

Overall your risks are low. Taking a few precautions such as using a public email addy and a more secure private email addy, strong passwords and not using insecure software will provide more insurance. Today for the moment, unless somebody really has it out for you the odds are that nobody will bother you. There are tens of millions of email addys out there. Most of these are broadcasted in some shape or fashion. So your email addy has likely been exposed most of the time it has existed. Still best to take a few precautions just in case. Especially if you have a reason to believe somebody has it out for you.

They really cant hack into your account as long as your password is not something simple. Dont worry, you will just get a bunch of spam. Dont open ANYTHING unless you know where it is from regardless of the email address that it says. BE CAREFULL!

They can sell it to spammers who will send you mass quantities of unwanted offensive email.