As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly secure your email account.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open your email provider's account page in a new browser tab, identify the provider and device you are using, and paste only those details plus whether the account works normally into the prompt.
   2. Ask the chatbot for the checklist, then open the provider's official help or security page and compare its menu names with the instructions before changing anything.
   3. Use the provider's security page to change the password to a new, unique password that you have not used elsewhere, without pasting the password or recovery codes into the chatbot.
   4. Open the multi-factor authentication settings, choose an available method you understand, complete the provider's confirmation process, and store any recovery codes somewhere private and accessible.
   5. Check the recovery email address and phone number, recent sign-ins, active sessions, forwarding rules, filters, delegates and connected apps against what you recognise, then remove or sign out anything you do not recognise using the provider's controls.
   6. If anything suggests compromise, stop normal account use, follow the provider's official account-recovery route, change the email password and any reused passwords, and check other accounts that use this email address for recovery.
   7. Return to the chatbot with descriptions of any unfamiliar setting, excluding secrets and personal message contents, and ask it to explain the setting while you verify the explanation against the provider's official documentation.

   Prompt

   Help me secure my personal email account without asking me for my password, recovery codes, security answers or any other secret. My email provider is [PROVIDER]. I use [PHONE, TABLET OR COMPUTER] and the account is currently [WORKING NORMALLY, LOCKED, OR POSSIBLY COMPROMISED].
   
   Create a cautious, provider-specific checklist in this order:
   1. Confirm whether I should use the provider's official account-security or account-recovery page.
   2. Explain how to set or change a unique password without suggesting that I paste it into this chat.
   3. Explain how to enable multi-factor authentication and identify the safest available option from the choices my provider actually offers.
   4. Check recovery email addresses and phone numbers.
   5. Check recent sign-ins, active sessions, forwarding rules, filters, delegates and connected third-party apps.
   6. Explain what to remove or change if I do not recognise it.
   7. Give a short recovery plan if I may already have been hacked.
   
   For every step, tell me what I should see before continuing and what could lock me out. Do not invent menu names or claim that a feature exists for my provider. If you are unsure, tell me to open the provider's official help page and give me the exact search terms to use. Keep the instructions suitable for a non-technical UK user. Separate actions I can take now from checks that require the provider's own support.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.