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Yahoo resetting usernames that have been inactive for over 12 months
- zoowar 13y agoWhat does it mean to be inactive? For example, I have an old yahoo email address that still receives email when I interact with some non-yahoo properties. I haven't logged into yahoo in many years. Is my account active or inactive?
- tehwebguy 13y agoFrom the article: > What if you haven’t logged into Yahoo! for over a year, but want to keep your Yahoo! ID? It’s easy. All you have to do is log on to any Yahoo! product before July 15th.
- kryten 13y agoIs this a big deal? Microsoft already do this with hotmail etc and have done for over a decade.
- hackinthebochs 13y agoAre you sure about this? Microsoft deletes your email after a time but your account is not then up for grabs. It still requires the same user/pass to login.
- citricsquid 13y agoAre you sure? I had an email address (@hotmail.com) that I used in 2005 - 2006 and needed it again recently to recover an old account, couldn't login (unrecognised) so I went through the registration process and "created" a new account with the same address and a new password.
- Neur0n 13y agoI can confirm this is still the case. Story made me check old hotmail account - said the account did not exist and allowed me to create new account with same address.
- hackinthebochs 13y agoWell, my last experience trying to recover an old hotmail account was a few years back, so they certainly may have changed their policy since then. I'm surprised I didn't hear about the policy change though, I would have happily used hotmail for a good short name :)
- doomslice 13y agoI accidentally hijacked someone else's hotmail account (and subsequently their abandoned Myspace account) because I was able to register the hotmail they used for it and then use forgot password to send a reset email on Myspace. I assume the same thing could be done for other services.
- kryten 13y agoYes 100% sure. I just signed up to outlook.com with my old address again and a new password.
- hackinthebochs 13y agoLet the landrush commence (I'll be happy to use yahoo again if I can snag <firstname>@yahoo/ymail)
- dubfan 13y agoI managed to snag <myfullname>@ymail.com during that land rush, but when I gave out my email to people, many thought the "y" was a mistake and would send email to gmail instead. The lack of free IMAP and the supermarket tabloid-style ads plastered all over the place finally drove me away.
- hackinthebochs 13y agoThat's a good point. A rare email domain (or worse a 'typo domain') may be more trouble than its worth.
- jurassic 13y agoI wish twitter would do this. All reasonable variants of my name and initials are held by folks who haven't used the platform since ~2010.
- recuter 13y agoThis is kind of weird, so somebody can sign up for mydefunctemail@yahoo.com and basically start reading emails that are meant for me? Edit: Consider a scenario. You know of an old rich eccentric who has been hospitalized in a nursing home or some such, you've interacted with them in the past and they have a Yahoo email. They haven't logged in for a year, you grab it, now you appear be them to all the people they've emailed with in the past. Including their bank.
- zacharycohn 13y agoUh... no. They're basically just deleting abandoned accounts and freeing up the name. They wouldn't have access to your data.
- sp332 13y agoBut any emails sent to my old address would be read by the new owner.
- ddunkin 13y agoSame if you move physical locations and your mail forwarding expires. If you haven't logged in for 12 months, can it really be that important?
- dantheman 13y agoYou changed addresses but forgot to update your bank to the new email address. Then someone resets the password using the new one and empties your bank account. Passwords are tied to email addresses unfortunately.
- hackinthebochs 13y agoExactly, this is analogous to your home address. Bad things can happen if people send mail to an address you don't live at anymore; it comes with the territory. I think a year is actually a bit short, but there should absolutely be some expiration date on accounts like email addresses. Five years seems like it would be more appropriate. Five years on the internet is an eternity.
- tyleregeto 13y agoMicrosoft does this with Outlook/Hotmail, all accounts auto expire after 12 months. It's always struct me as a really big security issue. If you associate and account with one of these addresses and it expires, someone can come along, grab it, and receive any email that goes to that account, for example password reset emails.
- ahulak 13y agoI logged into my account for the first time in a couple years in order to make sure it didn't get deleted. It looks like Yahoo also too the liberty of deleting all of my archived emails during that time as well. Nice Yahoo.
- hackinthebochs 13y agoHappened to me too. Was saving a few MB's per person on average really worth the ill-will actions like that cause?
- mirkules 13y agoI can see this going sideways quickly: with active accounts accidentally being deleted, people's mail being read by others who registered them in August, people who thought they would log in on July 15th only to find Yahoo is using a different time zone for this criteria, people who are on vacation until after then, people who never receive this notification... If there is one thing I learned over the years it's that nothing will ever go the way it's intended to go. This might get messy.
- harryh 13y agoI hope they do the same thing with flickr. I've wanted the relavent dead account there for years.
- Nux 13y agoBad call! If they run out of names they should add more domains to their service.
- ScottWhigham 13y agoWhy would Yahoo! want to add a different domain to their email service? They've practically given up on anything except being a "brand" at this point, and email is their #1 way to get their brand in front of people.
- ry0ohki 13y agoAlways wondered why more companies don't do this. If AOL had released screen names in the early 2000s it may have stayed relevant a little longer. Twitter could stand to do the same. I've been wishing there was an alternative to Gmail (because they keep making the interface worse). Yahoo seems promising but you can't get a good name... this solves that, bravo!
- wam 13y agoThe namespace market is growing all the time. Something to consider when naming your kids.
- marquis 13y agoOr teach your kids creativity when choosing handles.
- wam 13y agoWell, true, that's what we've grown up with: handles that are clever and reflect something about us (or deflect everything about us). But who wants to use john.basketball.expert@gmail.com as a professional contact address? Unless your full name is John Basketball Expert, which is sort of what I'm getting at. I wouldn't change my kid's middle/surname to Basketball Expert, but I'd consider something like Emily Clementine Raptor Mitchell. Seems silly now, but I like the idea that my child could turn on and off her searchability, or at least tune it up or down. Two namespace wars in the email address: the part before @, which is where we fight over who gets to be "johnsmith", and the domain, where we fight to get either johnsmith.com, the most neutral, popular name like gmail.com, or a short, memorable, personal, pronounceable, and easy to spell domain. And then we pitch headfirst into the coming TLD clusterfuck! It all makes for fun times and cash money.
- cllns 13y agoGender is required and binary? Jeez.
- thufry 13y agoWhy not? Notice that in "Country" they don't ask you if you've declared yourself the King of Sealand and are living on a platform in the ocean. For birthday they don't offer you anything less than 1900, even though there are people alive who are more than 113 years old. You simply can't serve all people's needs with any product.
- csense 13y ago> binary Does that mean you enter "0" if you're female and "1" if you're male?
- cllns 13y agoAm I being trolled? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_binary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_binary
- Zirro 13y agoI'll take the opportunity to break into this conversation and ask a question since discussions on this topic seem to be fairly rare on HN. If I were to launch a service where providing your gender was required (for the sake of this question), which options would you suggest I include outside the binary for those who feel uncomfortable identifying as such?
- cllns 13y ago(NB: I fall within the gender binary. Ask someone who doesn't.) I can't imagine many scenarios when it is actually necessary. I just found a good article about how doing Male/Female/Other is problematic, called 'The Gender Ternary: Understanding Transmisogyny' [1] Diaspora solved this by making gender a text field [2]. Seems like the most inclusive. [1] https://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/genderternary-transmisogyny/ https://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/genderternary-t... [2] http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2010/11/26/disalienation/ http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2010/11/26/disalienation/
- fatbat 13y ago12 months inactivity is too short. Too simple of a reason for something so aggressive.
- csense 13y agoSomeone should write a cron job that logs into your yahoo account once a month so it doesn't go inactive. You'll probably want the logs mailed to you, or put somewhere you'll look at regularly, because Yahoo's login interface is probably a moving target and you want to know when you need to rewrite your script due to Yahoo's changes. Or does Yahoo have stable, published API's you could use for this? This should be open-source, there's no way I'm giving my Yahoo ID and password to some third-party product I can't inspect.
- benologist 13y agoThis should make phishing a lot easier for services that are still registered to yahoo email addresses long after the owner moved on. Hard to imagine why they went with this over using some other domain for the accounts like Microsoft did with outlook.com.
- tlb 13y agoIt's a promising sign. This is the sort of decision that Yahoo couldn't make for most of the last 10 years.