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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."
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.
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!
No. Receiving email does not reset the timer. But I am confused about why people care if the account is open. If they are no longer using the account, and it contains no personal information, then it is just a spam sink, wasting space on Yahoo's disk farm, but otherwise doing nothing and harming no one.