Tell HN: Your old Yahoo Mail emails are probably gone | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Your old Yahoo Mail emails are probably gone

47 pointsmayank21 comments

If you haven't logged in to your Yahoo Mail account in the last 12 months, logging in now will create a "fresh" account for you, that is completely empty. I just lost 22 years of emails.

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I want to name and shame Verizon (as they own Yahoo) for this shitty policy.

I lost 15 years of memories and documents. I didn't login to YahooMail for a year, and it was all gone when I tried to login after that. Everything was gone without a single warning to my secondary email or linked mobile number.

I understand they simply wanted to get rid of all free users asap. Someone at Verizon management came up with this stupid idea of deleting all inactive accounts. What a way to ruin a brand.

Not sure if it's related but they also have a Customer Data Security Breach Litigation Settlement ongoing. If you had a Yahoo account at any time between January 1, 2012 and December 31, 2016 and are a resident of the United States or Israel, you may submit a claim for a cash payment up to $358.80 , and You may additionally provide documentation or proof to receive reimbursement of up to $25,000.00 in out-of-pocket losses. [1]

[1] https://yahoodatabreachsettlement.com/

Where can find out more about this decision? Are paid email accounts safe for now?

Here: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/empty-mailbox-yahoo-mail-sln29338....

You can also re-register an account that was deleted by someone else. Major hole in Yahoo's systems. Enables identity theft and other shenanigans

This is a massive security flaw if true.

All webmail providers used to delete old accounts and then allow re-registering them.

On-the-ball webmail providers don't allow this anymore, but some never changed their ways...

Not for the email provider. If the only authoritative identity for an account is “can receive an email at a given address” you’re just admitting that you’re outsourcing your security to an implementation detail of a few large email providers that you have no control over and a bunch of small email providers that you have no guarantee behave the same way.

A trivial example is Mailinator.

Considering how many times Yahoo!'s mail has been hacked[0], I doubt anyone still on it cares about security.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_data_breaches

That doesn't work anymore. I wanted to get access to some old emails after I let my account lapse. Recreated the same account with same password: completely empty.

But the security hole is not that you can access someone else’s email messages.. it’s that you can do ‘I forgot my password’ flow for accounts associated with an email address that was previously owned by someone else!

That's a major hole in web authentication...not Yahoo!'s mail service.

It's both. Yahoo! used to maintain a policy against address reuse for exactly this reason.

This is the only reason I chose not to delete some old accounts from different sites, and check on them yearly-ish. I used to think the internet as ephemeral, but I don't have that luxury as long as anyone else doesn't. From relatives to banks the authentication crisis is real. My soul is forever bound to some shitty teenage usernames and some poorly secured hashes distributed around the world.

I think it's on you to back up your emails. I archive my gmail account locally and also have an offsite backup.

True, but the cloud is sold as convenience, and backups and magic.

The reality is the cloud is putting your data in someone else's computer. Your data is technically without a permanent home.

One day, about 5 years ago or so, I tried to login to my yahoo account that was still active at the time and I couldn't even login. They just said my account no longer exists! WTF! the account I had been using for over 10 years simply ceased to exist from one day to another. After that, I vowed to never use another yahoo product again.

RIP Yahoo Mail!

It would be nice to have that history, but easy come easy go.

Excited to see what Basecamp/37 signals does with Hey.com.

RIP Yahoo and Verizon

My emails are all gone but Yahoo doesn't even seem to be working. I can't send or receive email. A search yields no help at all, save for a support team who seems too relaxed about it.

That sucks. Reminds me of when Microsoft deleted over 15y of Hotmail emails.

Free-ish cloud.. while useful, can't be fully relied on because ultimately, the cloud is someone else's computer.

The last time I used my Yahoo account was about fourteen years ago and the only reason I was using it back then was because of a girl who was using it. I nudged her to switch to Messenger (msn).

I think many people in academia still use their Yahoo account.

Interested to hear others' thoughts...

Do you you, or people you know, still use Yahoo? Why or why not?

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