This is basically the policy of all the free email providers at this point. Protonmail switched to a year inactivity recently but I think they were flirting with 4 months or something for a bit!
Tell HN: Yahoo Mail deletes all emails due to inactivity
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Re: Tell HN: Yahoo Mail deletes all emails due to inactivity
#22>A word of caution to all
to never rely on anything offered for free
> and I've lost some important emails
No backups => not important data.
Re: Tell HN: Yahoo Mail deletes all emails due to inactivity
#23Re: Tell HN: Yahoo Mail deletes all emails due to inactivity
#24Reminds me of my adventure with Yahoo Small Business for which I was paying them some amount every year for hosting my blog and an email service. They sold the service to Aabaco around the same time when I was moving between countries and had more important work to keep me busy. Few months later when I tried to login again turns out the service is dead and they have purged all my data.
I now host my blog on Jekyll on github. I don't trust other services to keep my content, learned the lesson hard way.
I also wrote about it on my blog in a footer: https://whackylabs.com/pbr/graphics/2017/12/30/writing-first...
Re: Tell HN: Yahoo Mail deletes all emails due to inactivity
#25Yeah, I discovered this about a month ago.
I was like "I haven't checked my Yahoo mail in years...I wonder if anybody has tried to contact me." and was greeted with that notice.
Pretty bummed, to be honest. I had e-mails to my family I sent while I was an exchange student to Germany back in 2000 in that box.
Re: Tell HN: Yahoo Mail deletes all emails due to inactivity
#26> A word of caution to all, set up a reminder to logon to your dormant email addresses every few weeks I think it's a chore that most of us would not do. How about writing a script instead to login every x weeks and send you an alert email/text for that along with emails count?
How about adding the account to your regular mail client?
Re: Tell HN: Yahoo Mail deletes all emails due to inactivity
#27The warning really should be to avoid using service providers for long-term storage of anything. You should have your own copies of any important emails/documents/etc.
Or at least check on your stuff once a year, or pay for service (money or log in and look at an ad).
You also shouldn't put a box in a corner of someone's house or office and ignore it for over a year.
Re: Tell HN: Yahoo Mail deletes all emails due to inactivity
#28Hotmail did this too. And it's really sad. I lost a lot of the early emails I sent as a child. It's a policy that saves nothing but builds tremendous ill will. I would never trust Microsoft with anything now.
Everyone does this.
No one lets you abandon trash at their place forever.
Re: Tell HN: Yahoo Mail deletes all emails due to inactivity
#29The only thing Yahoo is doing wrong here is not providing a documented tool to export mail.
But any POP client can download the mail to your local machine, and an IMAP client can export a mailbox.
Re: Tell HN: Yahoo Mail deletes all emails due to inactivity
#30I'd argue that this is a good policy, if you forget about it and there are sensitive documents etc contained within the mailbox then it's probably a good idea to erase it after a period of inactivity...
I'd also argue that if there are emails on that account that are important.... And it's a temp email address for a specific event... Forward the important stuff to a more frequently used email account? Maybe?