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Yahoo to Free Up Inactive Email Addresses

By Leo Boon Yeow - on 20 Jun 2013, 3:26pm

Yahoo to Free Up Inactive Email Addresses

 

Yahoo has recently announced that they will be going through a transition, where inactive Yahoo IDs will be reclaimed by the company. These reclaimed IDs would then be released to the public so users can sign up for an ID that was previously unavailable and inactive. Yahoo encourages users to signup for their desired IDs by mid July, and by mid August they will find out if the IDs have been secured. According to Yahoo, users who haven't logged in for the past year, can simply remove their ID from this exercise by signing in to any Yahoo product by 15 July.

While this is a good way to get users excited about getting a Yahoo ID, there are some concerns that the IDs being reclaimed and released would be hijacked by unscrupulous individuals who seek to cause mischief or steal identities. However, when reached by Wired, Yahoo issued a statement saying that it has confidence this transition will be carried out in a secure manner which protects the original users' data. Deleted mailboxes would have all of its associated data deleted as well, so that the new users wouldn't have any access to them. 

To ensure that these accounts are recycled safely and securely, we’re doing several things. We will have a 30-day period between deactivation and before we recycle these IDs for new users. During this time, we’ll send bounce back emails alerting senders that the deactivated account no longer exists. We will also unsubscribe these accounts from commercial emails such as newsletters and email alerts, among others. Upon deactivation, we will send notification for these potentially recycled accounts to merchants, e-commerce sites, financial institutions, social networks, email providers and other online properties.

Source: Yahoo, via Wired

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