6 ms·

Tangent related to this. I had an old yahoo mail address from late 90s till mid 00s before I switched to gmail. Lots of family / high school / college / early p

by mr-ron 4y ago

Tangent related to this. I had an old yahoo mail address from late 90s till mid 00s before I switched to gmail. Lots of family / high school / college / early professional emails were there. The other month I logged in to view them as I do every so often and yahoo had purged the entire archive. Like 20MB worth of emails gone. Apparently they have a policy if you do not log in in a year of time they will delete everything with no way to recover. I can’t imagine the decision making to put this policy in nor could I ever imagine using yahoo email again for any purpose whatsoever.

registeredcorn 4y ago
What amount of time do you think would be more appropriate before inactivity would lead to deletion of data?
aasasd 4y ago
Feels weird to be one of those patronizing old farts, but: Thunderbird has nearly all of my emails since mid-2000s, including accounts that are dead for years.
- dmd 4y ago
  Same but my archive goes back to 1988, including some I carried over from Fidonet.
- distances 4y ago
  I just have all my emails since 1997 in my current email account. Every time I've changed providers, I've copied the old emails over to the new one as they've all had some POP3 functionality for import. I do still have my first email account from 1997 too, but it was an early free email service that got acquired by Yahoo so I was hit by this same Yahoo deletion policy at some point. Which didn't really matter as I had everything copied over to the next one anyway.
- Jaruzel 4y ago
  Same here, glad I'm not alone in this. When I explain to people I can search 25 years of personal email via my current inbox, they just look at me like I'm making it up. When I switched to a personal Exchange server about 15 years ago, I copied over all previous emails from a collection of legacy accounts, and then more recently I migrated the whole lot up to Exchange Online. I also converted and migrated in old mail messages from a DEC VMS system I used to be a SysAdmin on.
sethammons 4y ago
You can't imagine paying for storage of things that appear to not be used when you are giving it away free?
- interestica 4y ago
  How are they giving it away for free?
  - melvinram 4y ago
    When they don't charge money for it and you're not using it (so no views for ads), they aren't getting paid and it's costing them storage money. How is it hard to see that they are giving it away for free?
    - Firmwarrior 4y ago
      Because if they didn't treat their customers like crap, they might still theoretically have had customers at some point in the future
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Someone who doesn’t login and doesn’t pay is not much of a customer.
        cratermoon 4y ago
        Someone who uses an ad-supported service for free is not a customer.
katzgrau 4y ago
Yeah well when `df` tells you the disk is at 100%, gotta start somewhere
plasma_beam 4y ago
Same here, though I still login from time to time, mostly because my apple id is still tied to the account. My emails are still there too.
dm319 4y ago
I remember this was standard back in the day, and I think the time period was even shorter. Think it happened to me on Hotmail at 3 months.
criddell 4y ago
I surprised you could even log in. I thought Yahoo was going to start recycling email addresses (which seems like a terrible idea).
reid 4y ago
Full disclosure: I work on Yahoo Mail, but I’m not speaking for my employer. Yes, this can happen after 12 months of inactivity for free accounts. Policy: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN2018.html https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN2018.html For context, Gmail has a policy which allows for deletion after 2 years of inactivity: https://www.google.com/gmail/about/policy/ https://www.google.com/gmail/about/policy/ I’m sorry the service didn’t meet your expectation, but for others here who are curious, there are some options for keeping email storage active! These days there are paid Yahoo Mail accounts available which retain email for as long as you have the subscription active. (Or you can log in once a year with a free account.) You can also use a IMAP app to save a local archive of all of your email. This works for all accounts, even free ones! More: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN5033.html https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN5033.html
- jrimbault 4y ago
  Just this afternoon I was with my father looking for a way to backup all of his emails on his yahoo account. I was looking "naïvely" for the button to request all of his personal data. I didn't find one and there's probably one somewhere I'm guessing. I resigned myself to set up Outlook on his computer and make a manual backup.
  - reid 4y ago
    Yes, I believe a local IMAP backup is the way to go.
  - idorosen 4y ago
    I use getmail (similar to fetchmail) to routinely archive (i.e., sync without deleting + reindex) all of my emails from various free accounts, just in case. It can save to mbox, Maildir, mh, and other formats that are easy to import to any MUA/LDA. This is worth doing for all e-mail, and I have a patch to make it support OAuth. I don’t think it supports JMAP, but it’s great for IMAP, Gmail, and Yahoo mail and deduplicates messages by ID and content, etc. while preserving tags/mailboxes (if saved as Maildir). I highly recommend running something like that in a cron job somewhere once a week to sync locally with some sanity checks (e.g., did it save any new messages? did the folder grow? Etc.) I also use it to save Spam/Junk folders, which then comes in very handy to train my local spam classifier for my self-hosted mail servers with lots of data. (Over 3TB of spam saved so far and about 20GB of ham.) Gmail’s spam filter has had a higher false positive rate than usual for me lately, so I have a little report emailed to me once a week of likely ham in my gmail spam box, which has found at least 3 messages per week that I missed.
rybosome 4y ago
I discovered that recently as well and was very disappointed. I understand why this happened from Yahoo’s perspective, but it sucks nonetheless.
tyrfing 4y ago
Microsoft has had a similar policy, although they entirely delete the account instead. Same for smaller companies like GMX. Definitely a contributor to sticking with Gmail.
unixbane 4y ago
Wow we should all use only Google because they are the only good and trustworthy email provider. Why do we even need email at all? There should just be a simplified protocol or webapp that stores everything on Google and manages all your authentication tokens for every website you use. </sarcasm> yup that was the end game for email as we knew already 20 years ago
alar44 4y ago
You don't store important information in free email services.
- NavinF 4y ago
  ...he says while fully knowing that the majority of humans store important information in free email services.
  - alar44 4y ago
    That's not my problem.
deorder 4y ago
The same thing happened to me and I'm still sick of it. I lost a lot of emails from the beginning of my career. I found out when I finally got around to backing up my old stuff. There are still a lot of emails that I wish I still had. I know it is / was a free service, but still.
83457 4y ago
Same happened to me with Hotmail. Sucks.
allenu 4y ago
I also used yahoo mail during that same period and am disappointed to see all my emails gone as well. I can understand the reasoning, but man, what a blast from the past it would to see what college-aged me was emailing 20 odd years ago. I think the last time I checked on this email was nearly 10 years ago and by that point, it was 99.9% spam, so pretty much worthless for day to day use.
jpalomaki 4y ago
Looking from a different perspective, this kind of account expiration is good for data security. Just think how many dormant Yahoo accounts there would be, forgotten by the owner and with weak and leaked passwords. Likely in many cases users themselves could not even remember passwords, making it impossible for them to remove the data.

by mr-ron 4y ago

registeredcorn 4y ago

What amount of time do you think would be more appropriate before inactivity would lead to deletion of data?

aasasd 4y ago

Feels weird to be one of those patronizing old farts, but: Thunderbird has nearly all of my emails since mid-2000s, including accounts that are dead for years.

dmd 4y ago
Same but my archive goes back to 1988, including some I carried over from Fidonet.
distances 4y ago
I just have all my emails since 1997 in my current email account. Every time I've changed providers, I've copied the old emails over to the new one as they've all had some POP3 functionality for import. I do still have my first email account from 1997 too, but it was an early free email service that got acquired by Yahoo so I was hit by this same Yahoo deletion policy at some point. Which didn't really matter as I had everything copied over to the next one anyway.
Jaruzel 4y ago
Same here, glad I'm not alone in this. When I explain to people I can search 25 years of personal email via my current inbox, they just look at me like I'm making it up. When I switched to a personal Exchange server about 15 years ago, I copied over all previous emails from a collection of legacy accounts, and then more recently I migrated the whole lot up to Exchange Online. I also converted and migrated in old mail messages from a DEC VMS system I used to be a SysAdmin on.

sethammons 4y ago

You can't imagine paying for storage of things that appear to not be used when you are giving it away free?

interestica 4y ago
How are they giving it away for free?
- melvinram 4y ago
  When they don't charge money for it and you're not using it (so no views for ads), they aren't getting paid and it's costing them storage money. How is it hard to see that they are giving it away for free?
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    Because if they didn't treat their customers like crap, they might still theoretically have had customers at some point in the future
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Someone who doesn’t login and doesn’t pay is not much of a customer.
      - cratermoon 4y ago
        Someone who uses an ad-supported service for free is not a customer.

katzgrau 4y ago

Yeah well when `df` tells you the disk is at 100%, gotta start somewhere

plasma_beam 4y ago

Same here, though I still login from time to time, mostly because my apple id is still tied to the account. My emails are still there too.

dm319 4y ago

I remember this was standard back in the day, and I think the time period was even shorter. Think it happened to me on Hotmail at 3 months.

criddell 4y ago

I surprised you could even log in. I thought Yahoo was going to start recycling email addresses (which seems like a terrible idea).

reid 4y ago

Full disclosure: I work on Yahoo Mail, but I’m not speaking for my employer. Yes, this can happen after 12 months of inactivity for free accounts. Policy: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN2018.html https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN2018.html For context, Gmail has a policy which allows for deletion after 2 years of inactivity: https://www.google.com/gmail/about/policy/ https://www.google.com/gmail/about/policy/ I’m sorry the service didn’t meet your expectation, but for others here who are curious, there are some options for keeping email storage active! These days there are paid Yahoo Mail accounts available which retain email for as long as you have the subscription active. (Or you can log in once a year with a free account.) You can also use a IMAP app to save a local archive of all of your email. This works for all accounts, even free ones! More: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN5033.html https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN5033.html

jrimbault 4y ago
Just this afternoon I was with my father looking for a way to backup all of his emails on his yahoo account. I was looking "naïvely" for the button to request all of his personal data. I didn't find one and there's probably one somewhere I'm guessing. I resigned myself to set up Outlook on his computer and make a manual backup.
- reid 4y ago
  Yes, I believe a local IMAP backup is the way to go.
- idorosen 4y ago
  I use getmail (similar to fetchmail) to routinely archive (i.e., sync without deleting + reindex) all of my emails from various free accounts, just in case. It can save to mbox, Maildir, mh, and other formats that are easy to import to any MUA/LDA. This is worth doing for all e-mail, and I have a patch to make it support OAuth. I don’t think it supports JMAP, but it’s great for IMAP, Gmail, and Yahoo mail and deduplicates messages by ID and content, etc. while preserving tags/mailboxes (if saved as Maildir). I highly recommend running something like that in a cron job somewhere once a week to sync locally with some sanity checks (e.g., did it save any new messages? did the folder grow? Etc.) I also use it to save Spam/Junk folders, which then comes in very handy to train my local spam classifier for my self-hosted mail servers with lots of data. (Over 3TB of spam saved so far and about 20GB of ham.) Gmail’s spam filter has had a higher false positive rate than usual for me lately, so I have a little report emailed to me once a week of likely ham in my gmail spam box, which has found at least 3 messages per week that I missed.

rybosome 4y ago

I discovered that recently as well and was very disappointed. I understand why this happened from Yahoo’s perspective, but it sucks nonetheless.

tyrfing 4y ago

Microsoft has had a similar policy, although they entirely delete the account instead. Same for smaller companies like GMX. Definitely a contributor to sticking with Gmail.

unixbane 4y ago

Wow we should all use only Google because they are the only good and trustworthy email provider. Why do we even need email at all? There should just be a simplified protocol or webapp that stores everything on Google and manages all your authentication tokens for every website you use. </sarcasm> yup that was the end game for email as we knew already 20 years ago

alar44 4y ago

You don't store important information in free email services.

NavinF 4y ago
...he says while fully knowing that the majority of humans store important information in free email services.
- alar44 4y ago
  That's not my problem.

deorder 4y ago

The same thing happened to me and I'm still sick of it. I lost a lot of emails from the beginning of my career. I found out when I finally got around to backing up my old stuff. There are still a lot of emails that I wish I still had. I know it is / was a free service, but still.

83457 4y ago

Same happened to me with Hotmail. Sucks.

allenu 4y ago

I also used yahoo mail during that same period and am disappointed to see all my emails gone as well. I can understand the reasoning, but man, what a blast from the past it would to see what college-aged me was emailing 20 odd years ago. I think the last time I checked on this email was nearly 10 years ago and by that point, it was 99.9% spam, so pretty much worthless for day to day use.

jpalomaki 4y ago

Looking from a different perspective, this kind of account expiration is good for data security. Just think how many dormant Yahoo accounts there would be, forgotten by the owner and with weak and leaked passwords. Likely in many cases users themselves could not even remember passwords, making it impossible for them to remove the data.