Yahoo Mail (or lack thereof)
I saw Ernie had done some work on the new Yahoo sites so I thought I’d log in to check it out. Notepad was… a textarea. Calendar was cool. Contacts still had all the information I had imported 4 years ago, which I thought was pretty neat. When I went to the mail tab, however, I was greeted by this not-so-friendly notice:
Your Yahoo! Mail account is no longer active.
Why is my account inactive?
Yahoo! Mail deactivated your mail account because either:
- You have not logged into your account in the last 4 months, or
- You have asked that your mail account be deactivated
What does this mean?
- All emails, folders, attachments and preferences have been deleted
- All messages sent to saxmatt02@yahoo.com are being bounced back to the sender
- You can still use your Yahoo! ID to access other registered services on Yahoo!
- Deleted information cannot be recovered
Protect your account!
Subscribe to Yahoo! Mail Plus and you will not be required to sign in […]
I got tired of typing. I think everyone at Yahoo should be banned from using exclamation points for a month, even in their code. I hope I didn’t have anything important in that email account.
10 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic. E-mail address never displayed. HTML allowed: <a href="" title="" rel=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
I’ve run into that too. I’ve been on Yahoo so long I actually have just my first name as my account name, and frankly it’s all trouble - tons and tons of spam from dictionary attacks; people use it to sign up for stuff for access on systems that don’t verify the email; lots of offers of German stuff, too - spam I can’t even read. I really only used it for backup, but with webmail access to pop accounts easy these days I don’t get in there much anymore, and the last time I got that notice. Fine by me - I hoped it would cut down the spam if everything was bouncing. When I reopened it: nope. Now, of course, it’ll fill up with 100mb of spam instead of 6mb and then get shut off. Progress… I guess.
Comment by Otto — Thursday June 17, 2004 @ 2:17 pm 1
Sounds like you’re one of the 50 million mailids that they boasted about freeing up.
The demand for saxmatt02 must have been huge! See if saxmatt03 has your old mailid now ;)
Comment by Joost Schuur — Thursday June 17, 2004 @ 3:53 pm 2
I had the same thing happen to me when I logged in to the webmail about a month ago. Good thing I never use Yahoo!.
Comment by Jeremy S. — Thursday June 17, 2004 @ 5:01 pm 3
Yup, I’ve seen this thing also. I didn’t weep about it though; Cool URI’s don’t change, but there’s a lot of benifits that come with changing email addresses once in a while (no too often though, as it also brings trouble).
By the way, 2GB? Trying to outdo Google again, are we?
:pComment by ACJ — Thursday June 17, 2004 @ 7:09 pm 4
The email address my family got in the early nineties still comes to my inbox. I think it’s a decade old this year.
Comment by Matt — Thursday June 17, 2004 @ 7:13 pm 5
It’s just the webmail competition heating up… they upped their storage space to compete with Gmail, so they had to add a feature from Hotmail as well.
Comment by James — Thursday June 17, 2004 @ 10:56 pm 6
I had exactly that screen just today! I’m not sure how it could count as freeing up email names though, since I still have the yahoo ID that I had all along…
Comment by Tom — Thursday June 17, 2004 @ 11:10 pm 7
Yahoo has been deactivating inactive accounts for some while. I’m sure they’re not alone in this practice.
Four months is a long time for any account to go unused. Most people would assume you didn’t want it at all. So, if you don’t use the account then why should they reserve the space?
If you were paying then that’s different, you’ve bought the right to be as careless as you want. Why should they care if you don’t use it then? You’ve already paid.
Just be thankful they didn’t delete your entire account. That’s if you’re actually going to use it.
Comment by Daytona — Monday June 21, 2004 @ 2:09 am 8
Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.
Comment by Italian proverb — Monday June 21, 2004 @ 5:49 am 9
ooooh Yahoo! Don’t get me started… They cancelled our dial-up account including emails that my husband was using for busines, without us asking or directing them to do so.
Comment by Katie — Monday June 21, 2004 @ 1:58 pm 10