

Yahoo resetting usernames that have been inactive for over 12 months - publicfig
http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/52805929240/insertyourname-yahoo-com-can-be-yours

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recuter
This 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
Uh... no. They're basically just deleting abandoned accounts and freeing up
the name. They wouldn't have access to your data.

~~~
wtvanhest
What about this situation?

A grandmother who has barely learned how to use email died in 2012.

Her friends are all in their 80s and only send 1 email a year.

Someone new registers the account and then... Then, the Holiday season in 2013
roles around and all of a sudden a new person is receiving emails from another
person's friends.

At that point, the scams they could pull off would be insanely easy.

Additionally: Any sensitive material intended for the original person would
instantly be compromised.

Yahoo is playing a somewhat dangerous game. The better option would have been
to buy a domain name similar to Yahoo.com and use that.

[ADDED] Now I'm really mad. I tried logging in and it requires me to send an
email to an account I had when I signed up for yahoo 10 years ago to log in
because it "doesn't recognize my device". Just like Google there is no way to
email them or contact them. Unacceptable. There is no way for me to log in to
my account.

~~~
sagarun
You can contact customer care by visiting
[http://io.help.yahoo.com/contact/index?locale=en_US&y=PROD_A...](http://io.help.yahoo.com/contact/index?locale=en_US&y=PROD_ACCT&page=contact)

choose,

Product: Yahoo Account category: Password and signin sub-category: My issue
doesn't appear on the list

~~~
wtvanhest
I did that, thanks for posting.

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jurassic
I 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.

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tyleregeto
Microsoft 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.

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ry0ohki
Always 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!

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benologist
This 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.

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csense
Someone 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.

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mirkules
I 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.

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tlb
It's a promising sign. This is the sort of decision that Yahoo couldn't make
for most of the last 10 years.

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wam
The namespace market is growing all the time. Something to consider when
naming your kids.

~~~
marquis
Or teach your kids creativity when choosing handles.

~~~
wam
Well, 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.

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zoowar
What 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
From 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.

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ahulak
I 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
Happened to me too. Was saving a few MB's per person on average really worth
the ill-will actions like that cause?

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cllns
Gender is required _and_ binary? Jeez.

~~~
throwaway061213
Maybe they don't want weirdos who claim to be something other than Male or
Female using the service.

Also, note I'm using a throwaway account to say this. If I dare to offend the
gay lobby by suggesting that homosexuality is a choice [1], or that companies
should be able to refuse to do business with queers, for example, even a
normally respectful community like HN is going to react as if I said we need
someone like Hitler to run this country.

I'm even fearful that I might be refused employment [2] or otherwise
discriminated against for my beliefs, if this comment is linked to my real-
life identity.

If someone's best response to an intelligent person who disagrees with their
position is calling them names like "bigot" or "hatemonger," and applying
sanctions to them, it suggests, to me at least, that the actual argument is
weak, and those who adopt these tactics do so because they know their position
can't win a debate on its merits.

[1] If who you have sex with is not a choice under your deliberate, conscious
control, why is rape a crime?

[2] Even in jobs where my beliefs have no effect on my ability to perform the
work. What I think about gay marriage should have nothing to do with my
ability to write effective unit tests, but I doubt a Bay-area employer would
hire me if they knew I made this comment -- and even if they did, they would
receive pressure to fire me from customers, investors, or other organizations
they work with.

~~~
cllns
The tiny bit of actual content in this comment is absurd, illogical and
harmful. The rest is defensiveness.

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hackinthebochs
Let the landrush commence (I'll be happy to use yahoo again if I can snag
<firstname>@yahoo/ymail)

~~~
dubfan
I 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
That's a good point. A rare email domain (or worse a 'typo domain') may be
more trouble than its worth.

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harryh
I hope they do the same thing with flickr. I've wanted the relavent dead
account there for years.

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kryten
Is this a big deal?

Microsoft already do this with hotmail etc and have done for over a decade.

~~~
hackinthebochs
Are 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
Are 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.

~~~
doomslice
I 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.

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fatbat
12 months inactivity is too short. Too simple of a reason for something so
aggressive.

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Nux
Bad call! If they run out of names they should add more domains to their
service.

~~~
ScottWhigham
Why 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.

