
Tell HN: Verizon quietly deleted my YahooMail inbox after 1 year of inactivity - throwVerizon
Hi HN, like a lot of people, I had an old YahooMail account which I was not using much. I logged in after many months to realize that whole inbox was gone. Looks like they have added it in Terms &amp; conditions.<p>But they didn&#x27;t bother to send any notification to my primary&#x2F;secondary email account or to my linked phone number.<p>Of course I made mistakes too, and I don’t feel entitled to their service, but I am feeling terrible and never going to use any of Verizon’s service again.<p>Just wanted to give a reminder to folks, if you have any old YahooMail account, please back it up, and&#x2F;or login to it at least couple of times in a year.
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netsharc
I've had my Yahoo Mail account since 1995 or 1996, at that time I thought it'd
be cool to have a @yahoo.com address. Last month I looked in my inbox and I
noticed I only had emails dating back to January 2001. The same in other
folders. Thanks, Verizon!

~~~
lightwin
You are lucky that you still have your emails since 2001. In my case Verizon
wipes my whole inbox.

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montroser
I've learnt the lesson the hard way that owning your own domain and pointing
MX records to an email provider whose service you pay for directly is the only
sane approach.

That way, the service provider is obligated to provide you service, and if
they ever pull any shenanigans, you just point your DNS somewhere better.

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rekabis
I use an older, non-cloud version of MailWasher to monitor my eMail accounts
(and using a hack to make it use TLS 1.2, which it never supported). This
means that I touch all my Webmail accounts on a daily basis, even if it is
only over IMAP or pseudo-IMAP.

There are other programs out there that can do something similar (so you can
maintain your Webmail accounts without manually logging on), so there are
options available. I just prefer MailWasher because of its ability to preview,
and I run an older one because it’s non-cloud and doesn’t store my login
credentials on their servers.

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fiftyacorn
Whats the best way to backup old yahoo or gmail accounts?

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jlgaddis
In my opinion, the best way to regularly back up an e-mail account -- so long
as it supports IMAP4 -- is by using something a tool such as OfflineIMAP [0]
(my preference) or imapsync [1].

Install it, configure it, perform an initial sync, set up a cronjob to have it
sync automatically once a day or whatever, and make sure that the local
directory it is being sync'd to is included in your regular system backups,
then forget about it.

If you're running Linux or macOS, one or both of the above are likely just an
"(apt|brew|yum) install" away.

\---

[0]:
[https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap](https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap)

[1]:
[https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync](https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync)

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hvass
It happened to me last week. I was so pissed. Completely unbelievable. Zero
notifications to my other email accounts. Hope Yahoo finally goes bankrupt.

~~~
lightwin
Hope "Verizon" goes bankrupt ;)

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inertiatic
Had that happen to me to an old hotmail account that I used when I was a
teenager. Sucks to lose that much history, and not sure how it makes sense for
a business to alienate a user so much.

~~~
lightwin
They are launching some new Yahoo phone service while doing this to so many
users. What a stupid idea.

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gus_massa
The old Yahoo! did this to me a few years ago. The first time I reopened the
account. The second one I just left ...

~~~
throwVerizon
It was my first email account ever, I would have been a paying customer if
they asked. Or I would have been able to atleast download some important
documents and pictures.

But they didn't even send a single warning or notification. I was also not
aware when they added the inactive account policy to their terms.

Very stupid policy, whoever at Yahoo/Verizon made this decision.

