The other day I came to a disturbing conclusion. I had no idea what the password was for one of my e-mail accounts. I set it up so long ago that I no longer remembered the password. All I do is double-click the connection, so I never think about it.
Here’s the bad news, you really should think about this kind of thing. To connect to the Internet, you have to include a number of settings. If your hard drive crashes or Dial-Up Networking gets messed up somehow, you may have a problem trying to reconstruct your connection without certain key pieces of information.
So, write the following information down somewhere safe:
1. The dial-up phone number you use to connect to your ISP.
2. Your User Name as it is entered in the Dial-Up Networking Connect To dialog box. Some providers have you include the domain in addition to the name (i.e., myname@logicalexpressions.com versus just myname).
3. Your password.
To configure your e-mail you should know what type of e-mail server your computer will be dialing in to (often a POP3 type server). You also should write down the name of your incoming e-mail server, which is generally something like mail.myserver.com and the outgoing mail server name, which may be something like smtp.myserver.com.
If you are a fan of newsgroups, write down the name of the News server you connect to. This name will probably be something like news.myserver.com.
Out of all of this information, often the most difficult thing to remember is the passwords, especially if you come up with creative ones. So take a bit of advice here and find a safe place to store your passwords. And don’t forget where you put it. In my case I was fortunate: my husband had written down the password that I couldn’t remember.