Tell HN: Verizon quietly deleted my YahooMail inbox after 1 year of inactivity | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Verizon quietly deleted my YahooMail inbox after 1 year of inactivity

17 pointsthrowVerizon15 comments

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 & conditions.

But they didn't bother to send any notification to my primary/secondary email account or to my linked phone number.

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.

Just wanted to give a reminder to folks, if you have any old YahooMail account, please back it up, and/or login to it at least couple of times in a year.

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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!

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

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.

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.

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

For Gmail they have Google Takeout:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Takeout

Actually works very well.

https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault

I've used this a few times for terminated employees (back when we were on dummy gmail accounts). It doesn't look like it's been updated in a while, but it still works [0]

0: https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault/issues/343

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

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

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

Hope "Verizon" goes bankrupt ;)

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.

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

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

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.

In internet v1 years, around 2000-2005 the limit was 2 months of inactivity even for new accounts (also an inbox limit of 6MB, later reduced to 2MB).

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