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Deleting Your Yahoo Email Account? Yeah, Good Luck With That (zdnet.com)
In the wake of security breach revelations, many of you might have considered deleting your Yahoo account. Many of you might be thinking about doing so soon. Heads up, it turns out, deleting a Yahoo email account isn't as straightforward as you may have imagined, and you again have Yahoo to blame for that. From a report on ZDNet: Several Yahoo users, who last year decided to leave the service, told us that their accounts remained open for weeks or months after the company said they would be closed. David Clarke was one of those departing users, whose dormant account was slowly accumulating junk over the past few years. "This was an ancient email I had set up, had no personal data in it anymore and had a unique password," writing about his troubles on Medium. "But it's a part of my digital footprint that I no longer required and decided, given the horrible security practices going on at Yahoo, to vote with my account and have it removed." Yahoo makes the account deletion process straightforward enough, but users have to wait "in most cases... approximately 90 days" for the account to close. The company says this is to "discourage users from engaging in fraudulent activity." On day 91, Clarke logged back into his account to find that it was still active. Unbeknownst to him, logging back in simply to check would reset the clock back to zero. "Yahoo confirmed via email yesterday if you access your account it resets the timer," he told me. "So, if you login to ensure your account has been deleted and it hasn't, you have to wait at least another 90 days."
On day 91, Clarke logged back into his account to find that it was still active. Unbeknownst to him, logging back in simply to check would reset the clock back to zero. "Yahoo confirmed via email yesterday if you access your account it resets the timer," he told me. "So, if you login to ensure your account has been deleted and it hasn't, you have to wait at least another 90 days."
So, if an account was being accessed by way of cookie (or other) exploits, I assume this would also reset the timer?
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
I wonder if checking by seeing if an email to it bounces would "reset" the timer. Because if so, spam will keep it open forever!
Good luck with that.
Though I have no way of confirming this nor I know if it's completely true, but I heard that it's not a good idea deleting your account at all.
The reasoning is that once your account gets completely deleted, it becomes available once again for whoever gets it, so it could end up in impersonation if it was an account that you used frequently.
I've kept mine but ceased all activities on it and deleted everything in there, while also replacing my password with a 20+ alphanumeric random thing.
The merger with Verizon got in real trouble with the latest round of security revelations. While there are good reasons to have a delayed delete, this may be a case of keeping the active user count artificially high in order to keep the merger on track. The whole goal of the merger is to get access to (what remains of) the Y! user base, and letting everyone get away before the it closes just devalues the deal and makes Verizon look like a chump.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
According to their Help articles they purge inactive accounts anyway:
https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN2...
If you try logging in you reset the counter.
https://www.facebook.com/help/...
I've repeatedly pointed out that they seem to ignore emails to "abuse@yahoo.com", and if you're a non-Yahoo recipient of spam from the Yahoo domain you have to surf out to this incredibly complex URL, manually separate the message header from the body and solve a CAPTCHA to report it. They may not be getting paid directly by the spammers, but the web traffic a spammer creates to use a compromised account web page to kick off a PHP-based spam campaign from Yahoo's email domain looks good on the books. It's evidence that Yahoo's hosted web servers and Yahoo's hosted email solution are heavily used and relevant. The fact that they aren't really something Yahoo can monetize doesn't get mentioned, just "Hey, look how relevant we are!".
You know, Hotmail (and presumably Live email) also impose a "ninety day cooloff" period on account cancellations. Hotmail/Live at least accept and act on emails sent to their abuse address, while Yahoo doesn't.
Yahoo re-issues email addresses after they've been deleted. Are you absolutely 100% certain you haven't used that account as the password reset address for anything else? If so, go ahead (so long as you don't mind someone else having your username). If there's any chance at all that your old Yahoo address's new owner could reset your Facebook password, for instance, then purge your Yahoo account instead.
Yes, everything to do with Yahoo is a travesty. Why do you ask?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
If you're not paying, YOU are the product. Yahoo will never really delete your account, since the account contains information which Yahoo can sell to third parties. They might make it so that the account cannot be logged into, but it won't be deleted.
you could lock your cat in a box, but you can never look to see if it's still alive.
I had an account by 2004 or so. But I lost my password (and login!).
Many repeated tries to recover these data from an email I forward messages resulted in no response from them.
In practice, the email is not mine anymore. So, no problem.
There is absolutely no excuse to keep a users account open for more than a few hours after deletion is requested. Taking 90 days is an insult to anyone's intelligence. No F'ing wonder why no one trusts Yahoo. Remember AOL and how hard it was to cancel service with them and why they've become synonymous with a failure to change business model? Blockbuster is another good example. This business model is becoming textbook operating procedure for failing companies. By not accommodating their users requests immediately regarding their own accounts it just serves to help the company fail faster once word of mouth spreads. Yahoo likely violated more privacy laws by not removing the accounts within a reasonable time period. On the internet 90 days is horrendously unreasonable. Hell 30 days or 1 week is unreasonable. IMMEDIATELY should be the law regardless of whatever reasons Yahoo concocts, especially since they've had massive breach after massive breach. If people want to remove their accounts due to a breach it should be available to do with 1-click without caveats. Companies that make it hard to leave their service only inspires hatred. Yahoo did and continues to do just about everything wrong that a company can do wrong.
If I didn't want an account anymore I'd just delete all of the emails, contacts, etc. Give it some random password (written down somewhere) and stop using it. If you're concerned about incoming emails just set your account to exclusive and everything should go to spam. If for some reason you decide to start using it again it'll still be there assuming they haven't purged it for lack of use. What I could really go for is Yahoo cutting the "security warnings" about my tablet pulling emails through a general app, I'm guessing their way of trying to coax me into using their app.
I know no one having one. I only read about it in news outlets that such thing exists. In doubt transfer all your data, change the password and delete the configuration in your email clients.
It's there... and it's not... but don't look.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
This isn't just Yahoo... Facebook does similar, and I wouldn't be surprised that other sites do the same thing. The info they have on you is an asset.
It's possible that a man could have done an equally bad - or even worse - job. So stop it, all of you.
(AmiMoJo has the painters in - Ed)
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Can't understand this hoopla, Yahoo will delete your email account if you ignore it for six months, it will be gone.
How do I know?
I l lost three different email addresses when I did just that, ignore them, and Yahoo deleted them all due to lack of use.
This just isn't a problem.
Yahoo happily deleted my rocketmail account when it was inactive for only 6-12months....
Purge all confidential data from your account, reset your password to something like "1lovespam" and post the username and password randomly around the internet until someone takes it over and starts spamming.
Yahoo will delete it down for you.
There's no place like
Yahoo can take as much time ascthey like to remove the account.
In the meantime it can be a random Internet Party House.
The best way to purge any online account is to fill it with data that is against the Terms of Service of the account. In almost all cases that is spam or porn.
I've done this on services that offer no true way to disable/delete an account and it works wonderfully each time. Even better, it likely marks the account as purgable by service providers, so the data you had beforehand isn't preserved.
Yes and the city *gasp* re-uses home addresses when people move! And -- get a load of this - the phone company re-uses telephone numbers when you cancel your account! It's almost like people should be responsible for updating their own contact information!
Nah thats crazy talk...
I would think that slashdot re-uses UIDs for a 4 digit to have made such a pathetically fear mongering post such as this. Obviously mailservers re-use email addresses if a user is deleted. That's what deleting should mean!
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
That's ridiculous and error prone. You could easily forget some old account linked to your email and someone else could then take over the account and impersonate you.
The best way to deal with this is to delete all the email, replace all your personal info with random fake stuff, then change the password to something as long and complex as possible and let the account sit there, defunct, so that nobody else can ever register it. Yes, you should still try to unhook anything you can from the dead account, but you really don't want a zombie you to take it over.
I deleted my lousy ancient account half a year ago. The damn thing is still there. Screw the rotten bastards,
the phone company re-uses telephone numbers when you cancel your account!
And too quickly, too. Especially when they're terminated for non-payment, meaning that the number's owner was likely to owe on collections to a dozen companies or so. I wish you could pay extra to get a number that's been dead for longer.
And if you tell a collections caller that you aren't who they're trying to reach, they're legally obligated not to call you anymore....Yeah, they don't believe you. That's what the person who owes the money would say to get the calls to stop, too.
Would it be possible for a fee, that they could give you an officially deceased account paper letter? Could that way assure that other's could not use your account to steal?
Meanwhile, back in reality you listed things that are naturally scarce. There are only so many phone numbers to go around. Google has an explicit policy against reuse, as do all other responsible providers. Yahoo is the exception here, not the rule.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
And you think email addresses are different? Tell my buddy John Smith how the name space for email addresses isn't limited. Hell, I have an exceedingly rare last name and my first letter last name combo is often already taken when I try to sign up for a new service.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Uh, I deleted my yahoo account months ago, after these reports. I know that the account was deleted, b'cos I access my emails thru Thunderbird, and the day I deleted it, I couldn't access my past emails on Thunderbird: it kept prompting me for a password (which of course wouldn't exist since the account was no longer active)
In the 90s, I had a hotmail account, which I just stopped using for years, and 2 years ago, I applied to get that same email, and got it. None of my old emails were there.
almost like people should be responsible for updating their own contact information! Nah thats crazy talk...
This! Most of the postal mail that I get are addressed to former tenants. Including some from the DMV.
I bet you think your posts here are actually anonymous. Good luck with that.
Fuck Yahoo!
Fuck Fuck Yahoo!
Fuck Yahoo!
Fuck Yahooooooo!
Is that JohnSmith1674 or JohnSmith1882?
Do they actually delete the account and black list the user name? So no one else could use it? I got the impression they just delete your data, but if I were to come by and try to take your username I could. What if there was some sensitive info still being sent to your yahoo account?
I changed my email address a few years back and never updated my Yahoo account so I'm good. I don't use web based email anyway.
a complete over reaction by a load of over-entitled shitforbrains
you know, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of people out there with the same first name and last name as I do
by all accounts, I am infringing on their potential accounts, and they on mine
no . not at all ...
it's not my domain, I have no "right" whatsoever to an account that appears to identify "me"
because it's a shared email domain, you give up EVERYTHING
facebook, google, ms, slashdot, fucking everywhere that offers "free accounts" - they do NOT belong to you, even if you DID pay that shared site
paints you as even more deluded, but whatever
the terms of service routinely and always exclude you and your so-called privacy
you gave that away when you signed up for residency on someone else's property
if you want your own account forever, get your own fucking domain
"free" email accounts are, like free anything else, not free at all - you don't pay in cash, but you pay in so many other ways it would be better if you had paid cash the right way
and remember - international law will generally protect your domain from others, but three letter agencies, governments, crooks and hackers just love a challenge and will take whatever they can get their hands on - human nature, and all ....
there is no safe place on the internet - stop dreaming - it's a fucking open network, it's not SUPPOSED to be safe
Just delete all emails and personal profiles in the account and leave. Yahoo will automatically deactivate the account after a few months.
Sighs ; shakes head. O tempora, o mores!
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"