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Similar concerns were raised a couple of years ago when Yahoo thought (foolishly) that it would be a good idea to "recycle" email addresses:

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/20/tech/web/yahoo-recycled-email/

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Do they still do it? That's horrific

Hotmail/Outlook used to(?) do this as well.

I had an account expire ~10 years ago. Somebody else registered the address and used it for several years, then eventually let it expire as well. Last year, I re-registered it, and used it to recover access to an account I created a long long time ago.

I'm still trying to recover my neopets account from 15 years ago, I used a bad birthdate

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