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Tell HN: Yahoo Mail deletes all emails due to inactivity

82 points by adhvaryu ↗ HN
A few days back, I logged into my 2 year old Yahoo Mail account, which I hadn't opened in the last 1.5 years.

Today, my account was "reactivated" and I was greeted by the following email:

> Dear USER,

> We’re so glad to see you’re back! Due to inactivity, your mailbox entered an inactive state. This means we stopped accepting your incoming emails. If your period of inactivity was long enough, we also deleted all of your emails. Now that you’ve signed back in, your mailbox has been reactivated and you will start receiving new emails again shortly. For more information, please visit the Yahoo Mail policy page at: https://en-global.help.yahoo.com/kb/mail/SLN2018.html

Rest of my inbox was empty and I've lost some important emails (I only used this email for some legal matters 2 years ago).

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

34 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 65.5 ms ] thread
NetworkPerson
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.
lnxg33k1
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
Projectiboga
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.
hypertoast
have been burned out by this Yahoo policy almost 5-6 years ago when it was (first?) introduced...
CommitSyn
Did they introduce it that recently? I seem to recall it being policy over a decade ago. My memory is sometimes faulty however.
cstrance
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
theolivenbaum
What a terrible police... Just logged on an old account of mine and it's indeed all gone!
gameshot911
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.
adhvaryu
I had a registered phone number but no backup email. I have no SMS from them.
ilanarain
I totally forgot I had yahoo mail account. Will try to sign in again
throwaway67743
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...
xp84
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.
TheHumanist
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?
throwaway67743
Well obviously, but most users wouldn't do that, they don't understand security etc...
tkot
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?
atentaten
Web isn’t required. I use it with thunderbird.
hulitu
Since when ? POP3/Imap access was available only for payed accounts.
nailer
I had my whole childhood email history deleted by Microsoft when they did the same to hotmail.
JohnFen
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.

hgsgm
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.

JohnFen
Even then, keep your own copies of important stuff. Never rely solely on other people's computers to keep your stuff safe.
light_hue_1
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.

hgsgm
Everyone does this.

No one lets you abandon trash at their place forever.

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

hgsgm
How about adding the account to your regular mail client?
mandeepj
Great idea! If it's important you'd do it, but then it'd be inactive in the first place :-)
yomlica8
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!
justsomehnguy
>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.

chunkyguy
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...

Sohcahtoa82
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.

hgsgm
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.

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