How many electronic accounts do you have? If you’re like me you have usernames and passwords for everything from bank accounts to email accounts to accounts that are used to access personal hobby sites such as woodworking or auto mechanics.

And in any organization, employees may also have multiple accounts with different passwords which allow them to access departmental email as well as select user groups within their areas of expertise.

All of these have accounts require passwords but like our keys or our socks we sometimes lose or forget them. Losing or forgetting your password to specific email accounts can cause minor irritation for some but can also be a source of panic when needed emails cannot be accessed immediately. Fortunately, there are many password recovery applications on the market for administrators and IT departments to choose from.

Here are five tools on the market for Email Password Recovery.

1. Outlook Password Recovery Master is an application which can display the logins and the passwords for all email accounts that have been created in Microsoft Outlook. It can also be used for recovering passwords for Microsoft Outlook personal folder files (outlook pst passwords).
   • Microsoft Outlook 2003 and earlier version support.
   • Instant password recovery.
   • Storing of recovered passwords in formatted text file.
   • Copying and pasting recovered passwords using the clipboard.
   • Easy and intuitive graphical user interface.

It can be downloaded from the following site: http://www.rixler.com/outlook_password_recovery.htm

This application is very easy to run and has a graphical interface that is very intuitive. Just start up the application and it will recover passwords instantly. It also has the capability to discover server addresses and the type, login and password of all email accounts on the server. As mentioned previously, any password protected personal folder files that are registered with the Microsoft Outlook can also be discovered along with their respective file names and passwords associated with the pst files. And if the passwords contain non-English characters those passwords can still be recovered. Password recovery of non-English passwords is a feature not found in many password recovery applications.

Additional features and benefits include:

2. Atomic Mailbox Password Recovery has a user-friendly interface and a very nice help feature that provides extra tips about restoring lost passwords. The password recovery process takes very little time and can be completed in as little as five minutes after installation of the software.

Atomic Mailbox Password Recovery can be downloaded from the following site:
http://www.massmailsoftware.com/password/email-pwd.htm

3. Mail Password Recovery 1.1 is an application that enables the recovery of passwords that have been stored in your email program for any Post Office Protocol (POP3) account. To enable the recovery of passwords an administrator has to change the email program settings – just temporarily – such that the email program is allowed to connect to Mail Password Recovery. Once a connection is made then the end user’s password can be recovered.

The methodology used to recover the passwords is that Mail Password Recovery will emulate a local POP email server which allows it to capture and reveal the stored password upon connection. The only requirement is that the target email program must have the accounts and passwords stored so that Mail Password Recovery can recover the password.

Mail Password Recovery is authored by “Aleksandar Boros” and can be found on many freeware sites by performing an Internet search.

Mail Password Recovery is compatible with the following operating systems:  Win9x, NT4, ME, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

4. Mail PassView is a small password recovery tool that can recover the passwords and other account details of many applications including:  Microsoft Outlook 2000 (POP3 and SMTP accounts only), Microsoft Outlook 2002, 2003, 2007 (POP3, IMAP, HTTP and SMTP accounts), Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail, Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts.

Mail Passview can be downloaded from the following site: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/mailpv.html

When Mail PassView is run it can display the following information: account name, application, email, server, type (POP3, IMAP, SMTP), username and password.

5. SniffPass is an application that captures passwords of email programs that are not supported by Mail PassView. It is a small password monitoring software application that will listen on the network and capture and display passwords as they pass through your network adapter. The following protocols are supported by SniffPass: POP3, IMAP4, SMTP, FTP, and HTTP (basic authentication passwords). This application can also be used to recover lost Web or FTP passwords.

SniffPass can be downloaded from the following site: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/password_sniffer.html