5 ms·

While I agree with the sentiment. Here's why you should not delete your yahoo account. Once you delete your account, yahoo will make it available again to eve

by wila 10y ago

While I agree with the sentiment. Here's why you should not delete your yahoo account. Once you delete your account, yahoo will make it available again to everyone. This means that if you have not unlinked everything it can be used by others to reset accounts on services you forgot that you linked to your yahoo account. Instead of deleting it, forward it all to another account and stop using it. Do not forget to log in every 12 months to keep it active.

donretag 10y ago
You can no longer set up mail forwarding with Yahoo. When Yahoo released a ton of unused accounts, I grabbed my last name (which I use on every service). I occasionally get mail for that email address. My Yahoo email is several years older than Gmail. It would take a LONG time to migrate to another service.
- pmlnr 10y ago
  > It would take a LONG time to migrate to another service. Why, exactly? mbsync (isync) between the two services, done.
zelon88 10y ago
Forwarding won't work anymore... http://betanews.com/2016/10/11/yahoo-disables-email-forwarding/ http://betanews.com/2016/10/11/yahoo-disables-email-forwardi...
- wila 10y ago
  According to a statement given by yahoo to techcrunch it is a temporary problem. See: https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/10/yahoo-makes-it-difficult-to-leave-its-service-by-disabling-email-forwarding/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/10/yahoo-makes-it-difficult-t...
  - dawnerd 10y ago
    Right, something so basic to mail software that in 2016 it's still under development? I'm glad Engadget saw right through that too. It's pretty obvious they're doing whatever they can from losing users.
    - utopcell 10y ago
      it seems that it wasn't forwarding that caused an issue, but rather its interaction with another new feature. For sure, Yahoo deserves more trust than what this article is giving it.
      - jacquesm 10y ago
        > For sure, Yahoo deserves more trust than what this article is giving it. Based on what? Since nuking Geocities Yahoo does not deserve any trust and it has been going steadily down from there.
      - smegel 10y ago
        /s
    - pmlnr 10y ago
      With the rise of DMARC, forwarding it trickier than it used to be. I understand why people want to dump it.
ryandrake 10y ago
Isn't your E-mail address used as the username in most services' credentials? So you should know which services you registered using your Yahoo E-mail address because that's what you use to log in. Just go in and change them over to using your new address. For those few that don't use E-mail, take a Sunday afternoon and log in to each of them to check. Surely it couldn't be that difficult.
- dpark 10y ago
  I have accounts at literally hundreds of sites, from credit cards and banks, public utilities, online stores, photo sites, discussion sites and forums, social networks, etc. I don't even have an exhaustive list of all the sites I've got accounts with. I certainly don't use them all frequently enough to know what my login account is set to and it would be a lot more than a Sunday morning for me to track them all down.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    This is where having a password manager can really help, you just search your password manager database by username/email and go through that... Just the same, it's probably better to check as you log into them for a year or so before abandoning the account.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  I just checked LastPass; 324 out of 770 of my accounts use an email address as the username.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    770 accounts?!!! I think this whole "set up a service for everything" concept ain't workin'. I'm trying to think how much storage just the TOS and Privacy Policies for those would run.
    - pavel_lishin 10y ago
      Many of them are old, and there are services for which I have multiple sign-ons. (e.g., four sign-ins for Hipchat, five for Slack, two for Amazon.) There are also a lot of one-off things that require registration to try out whatever they're offering. Some appear to just be security notes or stored keys from previous employers; others are imported from 1Password and haven't been used in the entire time I've used LastPass (5 years.) Some are just fucking baffling, to be honest. What the hell is vodka-hoop.com, and why do I have an entry for it? Anyway; what's the alternative to "set up a service for everything" that's not a single point of failure? (Although, I guess LastPass is that already.)
Silhouette 10y ago
This is an excellent argument for setting up e-mail using your own domain name, though, and for using that for all new accounts and transitioning existing accounts to your new e-mail address as soon as possible. The Internet works just fine when it's decentralised, but particularly with e-mail, relying on the big service providers (or an ISP-provided address, for that matter) immediately locks you into someone else's systems for no particularly good reason. Registering your own domain and setting up mail forwarding can be done with any number of services and costs less for a year than many people pay for a week of their cell phone service, and crucially, the domain is registered by some specialist service but is your domain and can be transferred to another service any time you want. Unfortunately it can be a scary-looking process for non-technical users, but for those with enough confidence to arrange it, I highly recommend it.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Although that also introduces risks. Losing control over your domain would be problematic. It happens. The argument for individual domains suggests itself, or an equivalent follows-the-person mechanism.
  - sk5t 10y ago
    Yes! Reducing the risk of losing control of the domain is a great reason to prefer gmail.com, outlook.com, or another similarly theft-hard mail domain. Otherwise, if an attacker can trick the registrar or nameserver, it's game-over for all accounts that use mail or mail-dependent factors for authentication.
    - Silhouette 10y ago
      Otherwise, if an attacker can trick the registrar or nameserver That's a mighty big "if", though. For any of the TLDs I'm familiar with, there are significant protections against unintended domain transfers, and that has been the case for a long time for the major ones.
  - Silhouette 10y ago

by wila 10y ago

donretag 10y ago

You can no longer set up mail forwarding with Yahoo. When Yahoo released a ton of unused accounts, I grabbed my last name (which I use on every service). I occasionally get mail for that email address. My Yahoo email is several years older than Gmail. It would take a LONG time to migrate to another service.

pmlnr 10y ago
> It would take a LONG time to migrate to another service. Why, exactly? mbsync (isync) between the two services, done.

zelon88 10y ago

Forwarding won't work anymore... http://betanews.com/2016/10/11/yahoo-disables-email-forwarding/ http://betanews.com/2016/10/11/yahoo-disables-email-forwardi...

wila 10y ago
According to a statement given by yahoo to techcrunch it is a temporary problem. See: https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/10/yahoo-makes-it-difficult-to-leave-its-service-by-disabling-email-forwarding/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/10/yahoo-makes-it-difficult-t...
- dawnerd 10y ago
  Right, something so basic to mail software that in 2016 it's still under development? I'm glad Engadget saw right through that too. It's pretty obvious they're doing whatever they can from losing users.
  - utopcell 10y ago
    it seems that it wasn't forwarding that caused an issue, but rather its interaction with another new feature. For sure, Yahoo deserves more trust than what this article is giving it.
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      > For sure, Yahoo deserves more trust than what this article is giving it. Based on what? Since nuking Geocities Yahoo does not deserve any trust and it has been going steadily down from there.
    - smegel 10y ago
      /s
  - pmlnr 10y ago
    With the rise of DMARC, forwarding it trickier than it used to be. I understand why people want to dump it.

ryandrake 10y ago

Isn't your E-mail address used as the username in most services' credentials? So you should know which services you registered using your Yahoo E-mail address because that's what you use to log in. Just go in and change them over to using your new address. For those few that don't use E-mail, take a Sunday afternoon and log in to each of them to check. Surely it couldn't be that difficult.

dpark 10y ago
I have accounts at literally hundreds of sites, from credit cards and banks, public utilities, online stores, photo sites, discussion sites and forums, social networks, etc. I don't even have an exhaustive list of all the sites I've got accounts with. I certainly don't use them all frequently enough to know what my login account is set to and it would be a lot more than a Sunday morning for me to track them all down.
- tracker1 10y ago
  This is where having a password manager can really help, you just search your password manager database by username/email and go through that... Just the same, it's probably better to check as you log into them for a year or so before abandoning the account.
pavel_lishin 10y ago
I just checked LastPass; 324 out of 770 of my accounts use an email address as the username.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  770 accounts?!!! I think this whole "set up a service for everything" concept ain't workin'. I'm trying to think how much storage just the TOS and Privacy Policies for those would run.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    Many of them are old, and there are services for which I have multiple sign-ons. (e.g., four sign-ins for Hipchat, five for Slack, two for Amazon.) There are also a lot of one-off things that require registration to try out whatever they're offering. Some appear to just be security notes or stored keys from previous employers; others are imported from 1Password and haven't been used in the entire time I've used LastPass (5 years.) Some are just fucking baffling, to be honest. What the hell is vodka-hoop.com, and why do I have an entry for it? Anyway; what's the alternative to "set up a service for everything" that's not a single point of failure? (Although, I guess LastPass is that already.)

Silhouette 10y ago

This is an excellent argument for setting up e-mail using your own domain name, though, and for using that for all new accounts and transitioning existing accounts to your new e-mail address as soon as possible. The Internet works just fine when it's decentralised, but particularly with e-mail, relying on the big service providers (or an ISP-provided address, for that matter) immediately locks you into someone else's systems for no particularly good reason. Registering your own domain and setting up mail forwarding can be done with any number of services and costs less for a year than many people pay for a week of their cell phone service, and crucially, the domain is registered by some specialist service but is your domain and can be transferred to another service any time you want. Unfortunately it can be a scary-looking process for non-technical users, but for those with enough confidence to arrange it, I highly recommend it.

dredmorbius 10y ago
Although that also introduces risks. Losing control over your domain would be problematic. It happens. The argument for individual domains suggests itself, or an equivalent follows-the-person mechanism.
- sk5t 10y ago
  Yes! Reducing the risk of losing control of the domain is a great reason to prefer gmail.com, outlook.com, or another similarly theft-hard mail domain. Otherwise, if an attacker can trick the registrar or nameserver, it's game-over for all accounts that use mail or mail-dependent factors for authentication.
  - Silhouette 10y ago
    Otherwise, if an attacker can trick the registrar or nameserver That's a mighty big "if", though. For any of the TLDs I'm familiar with, there are significant protections against unintended domain transfers, and that has been the case for a long time for the major ones.
- Silhouette 10y ago