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Log in to Yahoo by July 15th to keep your email address

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Re: Log in to Yahoo by July 15th to keep your email address

#41
post #37
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wired agrees with you ("a spectacularly bad idea"): http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/yahoos-very-bad-ide...

Wow. a 'journalist' that writes an op'ed piece and does not even mention trying to contact the company.

At the bottom of the page: "Wired has reached out to Yahoo for comment."

Re: Log in to Yahoo by July 15th to keep your email address

#44

What about other services that use Yahoo! ID? What happens to flickr accounts? I don't care about yahoo mail, but I do care about flickr.

Unused Yahoo ids are going to be recycled. Yahoo Mail is just one of the services tied to your Yahoo id. Just sign in to Yahoo with your Yahoo id to save it and your email from being recycled.

Re: Log in to Yahoo by July 15th to keep your email address

#45
post #14

This is terrible idea. People will be able to claim Yahoo IDs and use them to take over other people’s identities with a few password resets. I have a Yahoo email address simply as a backup for GMail. Just because I don't sign in very often doesn't mean that it is safe to hand over to someone else!

Wired agrees with you ("a spectacularly bad idea"): http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/yahoos-very-bad-ide...

Notice that it was written by Mat Honan.

Re: Log in to Yahoo by July 15th to keep your email address

#46

This is a terrible idea! I have a month to compile a list of the most popular first and last names and popular e-mail names and get a bot ready to register them all. Once registered, I can then attempt password recovery for these @yahoo.com email addresses at the most popular web sites across the Internet that rely on established identities (ebay.com?). If JamesSmith@yahoo.com ever used his yahoo id to register an ac…

1. Scan DNS registrations for administrators with @yahoo.com addresses 2. Claim as many of those E-mail addresses as you can 3. Hold your newly acquired domains hostage for $$$

There's money in that.

Yahoo better act like they know what they are doing. I'm sure their technical team does, but management doesn't always listen to the engineers, sometimes management just says "MAKE IT HAPPEN."

Re: Log in to Yahoo by July 15th to keep your email address

#47
post #31

Let me be the only one who thinks this is actually not a bad idea. I have a very typical name, very commonly used and if almost on every popular email service (gmail, hotmail, yahoo), I've tried registering a few varieties of my first.last@gmail.com or even first.last.birthyear@gmail.com and it's almost always taken. If you think your identity could be stolen because of an unused email address, it might be your fault…

In 2002 I made a paypal account with my yahoo email address. I attached my bank account to it, the same one I still use.

I haven't used that paypal account or that email address in years. A while back I realised the folly of this and removed as much information as I could from the account.

But, what if I'd just forgotten about it? Now anyone who registers my (common) yahoo email, attempts a password reset on the popular websites, can drain my bank account.

Re: Log in to Yahoo by July 15th to keep your email address

#49
I wonder if this could lead to an open invitation for people to hack into accounts based on services that use your email address as a primary key for your identity.

e.g. Joe Public hasn't logged into joe.public@yahoo.com for a year because he has taken a year off to live in a Buddhist monastery. So Eve goes in and signs up for that address, without any malicious intent.

Fast forward to a week later, when Eve signs up for CatNip, a website for sharing cat pictures. It says "You are already signed up for this service. Click here to send a password reset link to your email!" Eve can't resist the allure, and clicks through.

One click later, Eve has access to all of Joe Public's cat pictures on CatNip. (Even though she didn't really sign up for the address with the express intention of getting them.)

Re: Log in to Yahoo by July 15th to keep your email address

#50
post #39

This is a terrible idea! I have a month to compile a list of the most popular first and last names and popular e-mail names and get a bot ready to register them all. Once registered, I can then attempt password recovery for these @yahoo.com email addresses at the most popular web sites across the Internet that rely on established identities (ebay.com?). If JamesSmith@yahoo.com ever used his yahoo id to register an ac…

The people that work at Yahoo are not stupid. They will surely have a process in place to prevent a single person from sucking up all the short/popular email names. Even if that person wasn't doing it for nefarious purposes that would completely defeat Yahoo's whole goal here of getting these names in the hands of users who actually want to use them.

How can you be so sure?
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