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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."
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!
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?
Just check its twitter feed.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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?
Don't forget. You're here forever.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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
[citation needed]
This is some old maxim, getting boring over time, even when it may be true. But that they retain data is a claim which isn't backed by any sources i would know.
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
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?
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.
You mean you can still log into it? My thing disappeared the day I deleted it - I could no longer log in
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.
Sighs ; shakes head. O tempora, o mores!
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"