Jeff Atwood:

Your email is the skeleton key to your online identity. When you lose control of your email to a hacker – not if, but when you lose control of your email to a hacker – the situation is dire. Email is a one stop shop for online identity theft. You should start thinking of security for your email as roughly equivalent to the sort of security you’d want on your bank account. It’s exceedingly close to that in practice.

I think it bears repeating again and again: Your email is your online identity. If you lose control over it, you lose it. So, save yourselves the trouble and get a strong pass-phrase and turn on 2FA authentication.