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Comment by reid | Hacker News Reader

Full disclosure: I work on Yahoo Mail, but I’m not speaking for my employer.

Yes, this can happen after 12 months of inactivity for free accounts. Policy: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN2018.html

For context, Gmail has a policy which allows for deletion after 2 years of inactivity: https://www.google.com/gmail/about/policy/

I’m sorry the service didn’t meet your expectation, but for others here who are curious, there are some options for keeping email storage active! These days there are paid Yahoo Mail accounts available which retain email for as long as you have the subscription active. (Or you can log in once a year with a free account.)

You can also use a IMAP app to save a local archive of all of your email. This works for all accounts, even free ones! More: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN5033.html

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What totally enraged me about this is that the policy was apparently introduced long after I created my account. At some point when I switched to Gmail, I set up yahoo to forward to it. This worked for years. Then this policy kicked in and from one day to the other, the Yahoo account was deleted. No warning was sent to the Gmail address beforehand. There wasn't much going on on the Yahoo account anyways, so I only noticed it much later. I have an old YouTube account that I signed up to with that yahoo address that I can't access anymore, and not do the recovery process because email.

Easy, just recreate that Yahoo account right? Wrong, to suck even more, yahoo now only offers new Email accounts on their .com domain. Mine wasn't on the .com domain. But existing accounts on the other domains still work fine, so they need to keep up that infra anyways.

>Full disclosure: I work on Yahoo Mail, but I’m not speaking for my employer.

I've worked for large corporations before, and I have had training g that explicitly told me not to "go on social media, disclose my affiliation, and then run text support".

I'm not going to tell you how to post on HN - cause I love hearing true tech stories, but you might consider caution

I work for a large corp and I’ve explicitly OKed it with the social media team that it’s OK for me to engage with customer complaints online to get them resolved if necessary. There are a few guidelines, but they’re easy to meet.

In my experience, this cuts two ways. Some companies hire what about to PR flacks to respond to complaints with bland, vague apologies and company hype. The good companies have real support people tasked specifically with engaging on social media to help users fix issues, especially common ones. As you might expect, I tend to prefer to do business with the latter, and I suspect I'm not alone.

One of the things that makes HN special is getting frontline insights like what OP gave. Almost any thread with a major issue/outage will have such a comment. Most of the time, it will come directly from a CTO/CEO.

Gmail definitely does not enact this policy. Me and a friend managed to log into a shared gmail account recently we had from high school, to which no one logged in for more than a decade.

If someone had IMAP and sync with their mobile enabled, would it count as a login?

To my knowledge gmail has never purged unused accounts.

It would be a security nightmare to let anyone else register and reuse an email address anyway. So the only benefit is saving a little disk space.

But disk space for highly compressible text that will probably never be accessed is super cheap.

If costs got too much, they could easily take all very old emails and archive them - for example onto tape and cut down to one or even no online replicas.

Then add a button that says "Some emails and attachments older than 1 year are archived. Click here to retrieve them (takes 24 hours)"

Unrelated question, but since you work on Yahoo Mail...

What's its association with AT&T? My parents have an old AT&T email they want to keep after leaving AT&T. AT&T claims it's possible (which I find shocking), but it's not really clear who actually runs the account. I think it was originally sold as AT&T/Yahoo, so was it Yahoo mail under the hood? Is that still the case?

I don’t know the policy for email account retention for AT&T Internet email, so I can’t speak to anything about it…

But for your last two questions: Yes, it’s Yahoo Mail under the hood! That is still the case. Yahoo provides email hosting services for AT&T Internet users under a contract between Yahoo and AT&T.

However, all customer support for AT&T Yahoo Mail is handled by AT&T, so the best resource for help for those accounts would be AT&T customer service or their help site: https://www.att.com/support/topic/email-support/

Any chance it's from the SBC/Yahoo days?

Heck, I login daily (my Yahoo Mail is my "this online shop needs an email address" address) and a few years ago I checked, it's lost my emails before the year 2000. (Yeah I got the address when Yahoo started offering them, because I thought it'd be cool to have an @yahoo.com address...). Of course back then I actually had real emails, from high school friends and family members, which are all gone now. Great job your team is doing!

Just this afternoon I was with my father looking for a way to backup all of his emails on his yahoo account.

I was looking "naïvely" for the button to request all of his personal data. I didn't find one and there's probably one somewhere I'm guessing.

I resigned myself to set up Outlook on his computer and make a manual backup.

Yes, I believe a local IMAP backup is the way to go.

I use getmail (similar to fetchmail) to routinely archive (i.e., sync without deleting + reindex) all of my emails from various free accounts, just in case. It can save to mbox, Maildir, mh, and other formats that are easy to import to any MUA/LDA. This is worth doing for all e-mail, and I have a patch to make it support OAuth. I don’t think it supports JMAP, but it’s great for IMAP, Gmail, and Yahoo mail and deduplicates messages by ID and content, etc. while preserving tags/mailboxes (if saved as Maildir). I highly recommend running something like that in a cron job somewhere once a week to sync locally with some sanity checks (e.g., did it save any new messages? did the folder grow? Etc.)

I also use it to save Spam/Junk folders, which then comes in very handy to train my local spam classifier for my self-hosted mail servers with lots of data. (Over 3TB of spam saved so far and about 20GB of ham.)

Gmail’s spam filter has had a higher false positive rate than usual for me lately, so I have a little report emailed to me once a week of likely ham in my gmail spam box, which has found at least 3 messages per week that I missed.

I use a mix of google email labels, apps script, spreadsheet & drive folder to download every email (older than 15 days, so that I have enough time to delete it) as .eml files in Google drive folder, which by turn downloads it to my local disk.

The spreadsheet keeps log of each msg in a thread.

Labels marks the downloaded emails.

Apps script run on a trigger & does the heavy lifting of actually downloading the .eml.

Huh, this would explain why some of my gmail redirects have seemingly died.

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