Any recommendations on how I can identify any accounts that I've registered on Yahoo over the years? I don't think that I've sent anything important to them that would still be emailing sensitive information, but can't be sure - as I never planned for the scenario in which they'd essentially turn access to my email over to a third party.
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
#52Won't this mean that anyone with the new account will immediately be drowned with all the spam of whoever had that account before?
Re: Log in to Yahoo by July 15th to keep your email address
#53This is quite common in large online games where accounts often sit unused, having only a few hours of total hours logged over years.
Yes, but its unlikely that an online game account was associated as the password reset contact account for confidential financial/banking websites.
Re: Log in to Yahoo by July 15th to keep your email address
#54Won't this mean that anyone with the new account will immediately be drowned with all the spam of whoever had that account before?
What's much much worse than the spam from the original account holder is the fact that you might receive private personal communications from them. E.g. some long-lost friend could conceivably have you in their address book and choose to get back in touch.
Also, what about other accounts on the web that are linked to the email address? Many web sites allow you to reset your password by proving that you own the email address a user was originally registered with.
This seems like a spectacularly bad idea on Yahoo's part. I can't make any sense of it.
Re: Log in to Yahoo by July 15th to keep your email address
#55I have lost my Rocketmail email address this way after it was purchased by Yahoo in 1997.
Re: Log in to Yahoo by July 15th to keep your email address
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter used to do this upon request. I assume they stopped because a manual process was too time-consuming.
I emailed Twitter four years ago with such a request, and got this response: > Twitter is not currently releasing inactive user names. Unless your user name issue involves Terms of Service violations, you'll have to wait until all inactive user names are released. We're working on a better long term solution for this, and we should have more news soon. Four years later, the username I want(ed) has had no more activit…
Weird. I could have sworn it was sometime within the past four years that I emailed Twitter asking for a username and they granted it to me pretty much instantly.
Re: Log in to Yahoo by July 15th to keep your email address
#57This 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.
Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by indifference.
Re: Log in to Yahoo by July 15th to keep your email address
#58If this isn't the sign of a product with declining use, I don't know what is. Of course it isn't news that few people use Yahoo mail anymore, but the fact that it's worth it to Yahoo to turn those emails off is interesting.
yahoo mail was my first mail 15 years ago. But the product hasnt evolved much yet. In my opinion , Yahoo lacks of the proper agile culture where products evolve gradually (like google products ). Look at yahoo groups , feels like 1999 ... So they can buy start-up all they want , yahoo has a cultural problem. definetly , at least if they want to look relevant.
As a Yahoo, I can say a lot has changed in that regard during the last year.
Re: Log in to Yahoo by July 15th to keep your email address
#59A few years ago Yahoo! Erased my mail account because I hadn't logged for 3 month. It was my secondary mail account, so I in some periods I didn't use it. It happened twice! After the second time I never bothered to create the email account again, I went to Gmail. They continue to do this kind of things, so it's difficult to trust Yahoo!.
Re: Log in to Yahoo by July 15th to keep your email address
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
But a year? Come on.
What if, five years ago when you signed up for purephase1234@gmail.com, you listed purephase1234@yahoo.com as your recovery address? Now, thanks to this move by Yahoo, your Google account is in danger of being compromised.
Which, honestly, it kind of a dumb move on Google's part. I was never a fan of that recovery address process. The 2-factor auth they've implemented since is much better.