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Deleting Your Yahoo Email Account? Yeah, Good Luck With That (zdnet.com)

Posted by msmash on from the not-letting-go dept.

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."

7 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. It's all about the merger by mccrew · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  2. Facebook has the exact same policy by gQuigs · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you try logging in you reset the counter.

    https://www.facebook.com/help/...

  3. Because those accounts are assets. by mmell · · Score: 4, Informative
    Yahoo has a vested interest in making sure they're serving as many email accounts and hosting as many web pages as possible. They all represent resources, and that's important when it comes to reselling a business unit or the entire company.

    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.

  4. Do NOT delete your account! It's a security risk! by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?
  5. Re:I heard worse... by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 4, Informative

    I linked this elsewhere, but again to make sure it gets seen: yes, purge your account of all data, but don't delete it because Yahoo reserves the right to give your old address so someone else.

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    Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  6. This is par for the course... by ctilsie242 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  7. Re: Send it an email? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Also note that e-mail accounts never die.
    They just can not really die and disappear.
    If it was possible, then after disappearance,
    someone else could create the exact same
    named email-account, and appear to be you.

    E-mail accounts can never really go away.

    Burma Shave.