Most web-based mail accounts have an option to recover a forgotten password. They usually work in two different ways: sending the password to a different e-mail acccount or asking a question about something only the owner can know.
In the first case, if we know which account will receive the e-mail with the password we can try to recover it from there if it’s easier than the one we want. Maybe it’s another account which we already have to password or we can get access easily to it.
In the second case, we can try to guess or get to know the answer to the question. Usually, these questions are really easy to answer, for example “mother’s maiden name” or “name of your pet”, and with a bit of investigation we can recover these passwords.
If we want to protect from these attacks, we must choose a hard to answer question. Depending on the email provider we are using they will let us choose the question or we will have to select from a predefined list. If we can choose it it will be easy to enter a really difficult question. If we have to select one from a list we can enter a totally unrelated answer, taking care of remembering it just in case we need it later.
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