Tell HN: Yahoo Mail deletes all emails due to inactivity

I'd argue that this is a good policy, if you forget about it and there are sensitive documents etc contained within the mailbox then it's probably a good idea to erase it after a period of inactivity...

True, especially considering that a lot of accounts on Yahoo and AOL (basically part of Yahoo and does this same policy) are likely a decade or two old, so they may have passwords of like 6 characters and no 2FA, because that was super common back then.

Yup

I'd also argue that if there are emails on that account that are important.... And it's a temp email address for a specific event... Forward the important stuff to a more frequently used email account? Maybe?

Well obviously, but most users wouldn't do that, they don't understand security etc...

I keep an old yahoo account around for limited purposes. Their requirement is to log into email accounts once a year for everything to stay up and running.

The nice suggestion would also be that if you depend on third party services … and probably also if not, make a backup of important stuff, from thunderbird you can easily drag and drop emails in a folder and it saves the eml file

Hotmail did this too. And it's really sad. I lost a lot of the early emails I sent as a child.

It's a policy that saves nothing but builds tremendous ill will. I would never trust Microsoft with anything now.

Everyone does this.

No one lets you abandon trash at their place forever.

The warning really should be to avoid using service providers for long-term storage of anything.

You should have your own copies of any important emails/documents/etc.

Or at least check on your stuff once a year, or pay for service (money or log in and look at an ad).

You also shouldn't put a box in a corner of someone's house or office and ignore it for over a year.

Even then, keep your own copies of important stuff. Never rely solely on other people's computers to keep your stuff safe.

Whew. You scared me, I hadn't signed into my really old yahoo, and only two were in my switch list, but it worked fine and all the spam is still there.

What a terrible police... Just logged on an old account of mine and it's indeed all gone!

Reminds me of my adventure with Yahoo Small Business for which I was paying them some amount every year for hosting my blog and an email service. They sold the service to Aabaco around the same time when I was moving between countries and had more important work to keep me busy. Few months later when I tried to login again turns out the service is dead and they have purged all my data.

I now host my blog on Jekyll on github. I don't trust other services to keep my content, learned the lesson hard way.

I also wrote about it on my blog in a footer: https://whackylabs.com/pbr/graphics/2017/12/30/writing-first...

> A word of caution to all, set up a reminder to logon to your dormant email addresses every few weeks

I think it's a chore that most of us would not do. How about writing a script instead to login every x weeks and send you an alert email/text for that along with emails count?

How about adding the account to your regular mail client?

Great idea! If it's important you'd do it, but then it'd be inactive in the first place :-)

I had my whole childhood email history deleted by Microsoft when they did the same to hotmail.

This is basically the policy of all the free email providers at this point. Protonmail switched to a year inactivity recently but I think they were flirting with 4 months or something for a bit!

The only thing Yahoo is doing wrong here is not providing a documented tool to export mail.

But any POP client can download the mail to your local machine, and an IMAP client can export a mailbox.

Did you provide a backup email / phone number on your account? If you do, I wonder if Yahoo will contact you ahead of time warning about the coming inactivity actions.

I had a registered phone number but no backup email. I have no SMS from them.

Would adding the account to a mail client so that it logs into the account via IMAP on PC/phone startup help or does Yahoo require a login via the web interface?

Web isn’t required. I use it with thunderbird.

Since when ? POP3/Imap access was available only for payed accounts.

Yeah, I discovered this about a month ago.

I was like "I haven't checked my Yahoo mail in years...I wonder if anybody has tried to contact me." and was greeted with that notice.

Pretty bummed, to be honest. I had e-mails to my family I sent while I was an exchange student to Germany back in 2000 in that box.

Something similar happened with me and an old excite.com email address I had since the early days of the public web.

>A word of caution to all

to never rely on anything offered for free

> and I've lost some important emails

No backups => not important data.

ALWAYS back up stuff to storage that you have control over!

I totally forgot I had yahoo mail account. Will try to sign in again

have been burned out by this Yahoo policy almost 5-6 years ago when it was (first?) introduced...

Did they introduce it that recently? I seem to recall it being policy over a decade ago. My memory is sometimes faulty however.

No its been a long standing policy, i was bit by it a few times with different accounts, just need to log in like once a year, they email you ahead of time at alternate email if you have on file warning