Yahoo has just announced that come mid-July, all Yahoo accounts that haven’t been logged into within the past 12 months will be shut down.
That means any data contained within those accounts will be deleted, and the account IDs (i.e. usernames) will be made available to other users.
Of course if you have an account that you haven’t logged into in over a year, chances are you won’t really be too upset about losing it.
But what if the account ID contains your real name or some other bit of personal or financial info that you’d rather not see fall under someone else’s control?
If you have a dormant Yahoo account that you really don’t want to lose, it’s very easy to keep it under your control…
Simply log in to any Yahoo service (Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Answers, Flickr, etc.) using that account ID by July 15 and the clock will be reset beginning at that point.
From then on, as long as you log into your inactive account at least once every 12 months you won’t lose it.
Why is Yahoo planning to close dormant accounts and reassign the account IDs associated with them to new users?
It’s simple really. All the really “good” account ID’s have long been taken, yet bunches of them are sitting idle and not being actively used.
Their new “annual reset” policy will help free up many of those “good” usernames so that new users can sign up for them.
Also, dormant accounts take up valuable storage space on Yahoo’s servers. Closing those accounts will that space up.
Bottom line: If you still have a Yahoo account but you haven’t actually logged into it in while you’ll need to do that ASAP if you don’t want to lose access to that account and all the data that’s contained within it.
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