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Comment by maldeh | Hacker News Reader

However, attempts to contact more than 100 of the addresses in the sample saw many returned as undeliverable with auto-responses reading: "This account has been disabled or discontinued," which might suggest that the data is old.

Or another sad possibility is that this may be representative of any sample of yahoo email addresses.

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One of my friends had years of correspondence stored in a Yahoo Mail account, including letters from people who had then passed away.

She did a study abroad, and when she came home a year later discovered that Yahoo had closed the account. All of that correspondence was gone forever.

Classic from old Hotmail as well.

Don't think hotmail do this anymore but I am sure I fell victim to it 16 or so years ago.

Likewise. It was a really sad day when I realized I couldn't find e-mails I sent and received when I touched the internet for the first time.

It would have been quite a ride down nostalgia lane.

hotmail / outlook does still delete email from inactive accounts, and then the account itself. you have to log in every <270 days (9 months) to keep the system from deleting your mail and in <12 months to keep your email address/account alive.[1] but you will get emails to your secondary email address as a warning before this happens. gmail also does the same, but likely on a longer time horizon[2].

[2] I worked on outlook.com and http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail-...

[2] https://www.quora.com/Will-Google-deactivate-my-Gmail-accoun...

The quora link you posted also says that gmail does NOT do that anymore - the clause was removed from their policy.

I worked for a listed game company. We often delete inactive account for making a better revenue report. Once an account is deleted，all the money he paid can be immediately confirmed as revenue.

I still remember too. 28 days? I was easily off-grid for 28 days.

At the moment, we are heavily focusing on "exit strategies" for outsourcing agreements in regulated industries. Banking is leading the way, followed by insurance, but it's hard not to recommend to any CRO in a company with business to lose.

I would think a whole year is a more than reasonable time for a free service to keep your account for.

While it is probably true that a big chunk of yahoo addresses are defunct, this could probably be said about most free providers.

The more interesting fact about Yahoo mail is that Verizon now will manage a very large percentage of all free email accounts on the planet now. US estimate for Yahoo, AOL, Verizon would be somewhere near 35-40%.

And before the No Way AOL reply trickles in from somewhere, AOL is still estimated near 10% of total active addresses in the US, and is substantiated by the ESPs. edit* With the demographic of your sample being very linked to that percentage.

There's also a point in cleaning up old accounts in order to protect people's privacy. These might be accounts the user has forgotten or no longer has possibility to access the account (forgotten password). Even though user can't access the account, it might be still accessible to others with malicious intents. Maybe the password was weak, maybe user used the same password in multiple services and it is not publicly available in some datadump.

I still have a very desirable e-mail address from when they initially released a lot of abandoned e-mails, after Mayer took over. I haven't really used it since.

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