Do you have some important old messages that you don’t want to lose stored in a Yahoo Mail account that you haven’t logged into for a while?
If so, you could well be on the verge of losing those messages.
In fact, if it’s been over a year since you last accessed that particular Yahoo email account they could well be gone already.
Way back in June of 2013 I wrote this post explaining how Yahoo was planning to start deleting entire Yahoo user accounts that hadn’t been logged into in over a year.
According to Yahoo at the time, all that would be required to keep an account from being closed was to log into ANY Yahoo service at least once a year.
That meant as long as you log into your Yahoo Mail account, Yahoo News or any other distinct Yahoo service before a year has elapsed your entire Yahoo account will remain open.
Easy, peasy, right?
Well, I received a message this morning from Josh Spector (the guy behind the awesome For The Interested Newsletter) saying Yahoo had deleted ALL of the old emails from his Yahoo Mail account because he hadn’t accessed that specific account in over a year.
After doing a little digging I discovered this is actually happening to every Yahoo Mail account holder who hasn’t accessed their email service in over a year.
But wait, I thought the accounts were safe as long as they were logged into at least once a year?
Well, the umbrella Yahoo accounts themselves apparently are safe. But the data that’s stored in the various individual Yahoo services that are connected to those accounts isn’t!
In a nutshell, while folks are finding that their Yahoo accounts are still active if they log in within Yahoo’s designated 30 day grace period, the data that had been stored within their various Yahoo services has been deleted.
Bottom line: If you have important emails stored in a Yahoo Mail account that you haven’t accessed in a while you’ll need to log into that specific email service ASAP in order to prevent Yahoo from deleting them.
That also goes for any other Yahoo service that you haven’t used for a while as well.
And finally, remember that simply keeping an umbrella Yahoo account active won’t prevent Yahoo from deleting the data that’s stored in that account’s associated underlying services.
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