Thanks for posting this. I've got several accounts on autopay attached to my yahoo address, but nothing else of note. Re-captured my account after 2 years away.
This would not have been good if it had been given away.
Legitimate question: how can you have accounts on autopay attached to an e-mail address you haven't checked in 2 years?
You have literally not looked at any of the receipts in 2 years? If you've cancelled any of the credit cards, you had no idea that there was an autopay problem? The merchants had no way of contacting you, because you never checked that email?
That doesn't make any sense to me. Or was it just forwarding the emails to the account you do use, or whatnot? In which case, I assume that Yahoo would be sending emails warning of the upcoming account closure, which you could receive and act on?
You have literally not looked at any of the receipts in 2 years? If you've cancelled any of the credit cards, you had no idea that there was an autopay problem? The merchants had no way of contacting you, because you never checked that email?
For me, this is done through the web interface in almost all cases. Did my hosting account try to charge my credit-card and it was declined? It'll show up in the account dashboard. Do I want to look at my Amazon receipts? They're under Your Account -> Your Orders.
I'm updating some old emails now since I was reminded of it, but generally I don't care about receiving email from websites, so I typically send them to an account I don't check in order to keep them out of my way, and to ensure that if they sell my email, the spam will go there too (in my case it's an old AOL account). A number of sites won't even send you anything via email except "please log in" anyway. For example, when my bank sends me a "bank statement" by email, all it contains is a notification that there is a new bank statement waiting online, if I want to log in and read it. So the email is not needed or useful for services where I already log in regularly.
By watching charges via online banking, and it being a service I use every day with a very small repeating charge (e.g. Pandora). Set it, forget it, reap the benefits. Most services do not require monitoring.
As for warning emails, I had a backup email listed with them, and I have received nothing on either the backup email or the Yahoo email warning of this potential problem.
This would not have been good if it had been given away.