Yahoo Mail Warning

[Tom Saurus]

If you have a Yahoo Mail account that you use infrequently sign in and use it more often. After a certain time of inactivity, they will delete all your messages. This happened to my account that I have associated with Videohelp. They said I hadn't signed in for a year into that Yahoo Mail and thus all my emails I received from Videohelp got purged along with everything else. So now I am signing in more often with my other email accounts trying not to let the same thing happen there.

If anyone else has input please share it as it can be an important issue for some of us.

[El Heggunte]

Some months ago my latest Yahoo! Mail account (created in May of 2020) was locked
First the answering bot insisted that my password was incorrect, which is B.S.
Then I logged in with my mobile phone number, and this time the bot told me that my phone number "one day" belonged to a different user...
—this probably is true, but it should not be relevant anyway...

Then the bot asked me whether I wanted to "erase" that username that had been created by someone else,
I answered yes......
and in the end my email account remained locked (password /username not recognized) -_-

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Now, regarding GMail...

yes, they deleted two email accounts that I created in 2005 and 2006 respectively.......
Probably the actual reason why they were terminated was /is: those accounts were NOT associated with a mobile phone number.

[lordsmurf]

The best advice is to not use Yahoo. I used a Yahoo account from the 1990s until 2014. By 2014, it was always overrun by spam, filters never worked, ads plastered everywhere in webmail, pop/smtp always had problems. Breaches, not allowing you to change/remove certain info like birthdate (I'm still waiting for somebody to sue over that one). I still have it, log in every few months, but after several years it's all empty or spam. I long ago moved all messages out of Yahoo into Outlook locally.

I used to have a Gmail account, was an early invite user. Also terrible now, but not as bad as Yahoo.

Hotmail not any better, had actually been worse for many years.

[Tom Saurus]

The main use for them is to try to remain anonymous but if you have to give them your phone number and whatever else, you might as well give up. I have a Gmail Account that I use mostly just for the Android Platform so I can install apps and such.

I am signing in more often now. Thank you for the input.

[Rain26]

I had the same experience as well.. quite a bit of a hassle

[cornemuse]

I have? a yahoo account, they wont let me access it 'cause I wont give them a phone #. (change in policy) I only want to access it one last time to see who I used it for, for whichever forums I registered.

Gmail asks about every 3rd time I log in for a phone# "for my security" (3 email accts.) click 'not at this time'