When I first got a gmail account I didnt take it too seriously, another random email, and so I set it up with a password that I commonly used as a "throwaway".. it was relatively weak and used on a few other sites, including ones that don't even bother with encryption; but again, why did I care? its some junk email site...
Then I started using google docs, then google analytics, google checkout, google adsense, blogger, and so on... the throwaway little junk email was suddenly responsible for a large portion of my online presense and tied to at least one credit card, and the other day I was logging into gmail and realised what i was typing... a weak password, used on multiple sites, with high exposure.
Needless to say, I went and changed it to somthing much stronger. In fact I took the opportunity to change most of my passwords to stronger alternatives, making sure to separate the secure and insecure sites, and I encourage everyone else to as well.
Take a moment and think about how many sites you use the same password for, google especially, and if any of those sites have a login in cleartext.
It's amazing how these things can just sneak up on people.
P.S. for the unaware, a strong password is longer than 8 characters and composed of letters, numbers, and symbols, or a sentence/phrase that's longer than 16 characters.
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