For some truly unknown and unfathomable reason, YahooMail killed my 9-year-old+ (created in 1998 or so) email account that I had been using as my "core" email address since that time and I'm at a loss as to what to do, they simply "deactivated" my account without any warning whatsoever and for no apparent reason since I never used to spam from or anything similar.

I found their form online that you're supposed to fill out EXACTLY to request help and/or "reactivation" but the thing is, they want your EXACT information that you filled originally, and we're talking nine years ago now, such as the security question you chose, the answer to it, your exact zip code (back then?, you're kidding me, right?), etc. and they make it very clear if ALL the info provided doesn't match perfectly, they won't respond.

Considering that I had some very important saved messages in my files there as well as some equally important email addresses in my address book that were in this YahooMail account but nowhere else, I'm truly at a loss as to what to do next to try to get Yahoo to restore/recover this account . . . help, suggestions anyone?, Thanks in advance!, Yours, Kent

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http://hkentcraig.com

Yikes. Normal channels probably won't work. Maybe find some Yahoo! employee blogs and try getting a more personal approach?

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Hate to say it, but Yahoo has a nasty habit of deleting accounts, and these deletions sometimes seem to be random. Making it even worse, when they came out with unlimited storage, they announced they would be scanning e-mails for "abuse" and delete accounts based on contents of e-mails.

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My son very recently could not remember his password after reformatting his hard drive. He wrote to Yahoo and they were very helpful. He could not remember his security question either. He very quickly got into his email. Maybe explaining to Yahoo just may have some good results for you.

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Kevin

http://www.quickplayhorseracingsoftware.com/

Went through the same thing trying to wrestle my main site domain from a terrible service known as Melbourne IT who like to give people from the USA a very hard way to go.

I called Yahoo and they were the most helpful group I have ever met. I needed to know the credit card number from when I originally purchased the domain from Yahoo years before and they walked me through how to find my Yahoo Wallet.

The coolest thing was I did not know I had a Yahoo Wallet

Give them a call.. you'll love their service!

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Um, you depended on an outside source to save/back up YOUR stuff?

If you ARE reinstated I would highly suggest stripping out everything of value, buying your own domain name and hosting, and setting up an email with pop/smtp, where you have control of downloading and backing up your email, and don't have to worry about an ISP buyout or other madness.

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Yahoo's not the only ASP who has this problem. I've had clients experience the same with MSN, both paid for MSN & free Hotmail accounts, as well as paid for AOL accounts.

Whether or not you can resolve the issue is going to depend solely on your being sufficiently persistent so as to eventually deal with someone who both knows how to help & gives a damn.

Good Luck.

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You mean they keep credit card numbers ON FILE ON THE SERVER? Ack! Be afraid. Be very afraid!

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I have a Yahoo/Prodigy account but almost never go to the Yahoo email site to get my email. Why do that when you can get an automatic download into your Outlook or Outlook Express mailbox right on your desktop. That way everything is on your hard drive. Suggest that you configure your email in a similar fashion. Good luck and hope that it all works out for you. BTW, from what others have said about Yahoo being a big and a friendly help, I can confirm that.

Peace,
Calius

Sem,

I looked and looked and couldn't find any contact numbers for Yahoo's HelpDesk or such, begging a favor, would you happen to have them handy or can post back the URL of the page with the number(s) on them? I'd be ever so greatful, Thanks.

The killer in all this, the reason needing my "hkcraig@yahoo.com" email account re-established is that is has been the primary email contact address for my monthly column on project management for "Contractor" magazine:

Craig on Project Management : Archives

since 1998 and because of that it has been published in the footer of every column since then and will be floating around forever because of that . . . my editor at "Contractor" was understanding but wasn't too happy that it happened even though it wasn't my fault.

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"Real artists ship" ~~~ Steve Jobs
http://hkentcraig.com

Not to worry as if you give them a call, they will be able to assist you and get your account re-instated. But as said by others, I wouldn't want to be dependent on Yahoo mail when comes to contact addresses or any other important info. I would rather save it on my local harddrive and backup on CDs. You will never know such thing like what is happening to you and others.

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Try calling Yahoo Customer Service at 1-866-562-7219

To prevent this from happening again, I also suggest that you upgrade to Yahoo Mail Plus.

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Forget yahoo pro, I would only pay that fee just to have forwarding or pop3, since your old yahoo address is valuable. Gmail has tons of neat features, plus I get the feeling that they won't be deleting your acc't so quickly. They were after all, the first email system that recommended people never delete any email as well as give away one gigabyte of storage.

If you don't want to pay just for a forward account, then use FreePOPs, setup to automatically login and download your email to a desktop email (it acts as a local pop3 proxy), then set your desktop email program to forward all that mail to a gmail account.
You might want a separate machine dedicated for this.

Then in gmail you can see only the mail to that address using their powerful filtering to label it.

In your case, the filter would probably be
from:xxxxx@gmail.com and
contains the text: forwarded message
or
subject: fwd:


I would hope only a one-way hashed version is stored a la unix crypt(3), and then only the last four digits. That's the standard for the pci industry, I'm assuming?


melbourne it is actually the company that yahoo outsources their domain/dns hosting to. Just do a whois on any yahoo hosted domain, you'll see.

Did the wallet have money it in? It would be spooky if it did.

That is the standard, but if he was able to view the card number, it wasn't a one way hash.

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Interestingly Average Security Blog

Hi,

I have Paypal send orders into my paid host email account and then forwarded to my Yahoo account so I have a backup. Once in a great while one does not get forwarded but the orders are printed from Paypal which is the deciding factor anyway.

I had a couple of old yahoo accounts that were also inactive but I just reactivated them.
I don't remember them asking any security questions. If they did I guess I remembered it.

The amount of passwords and id's it seems we need to remember nowadays is overwhelming.

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Here's the connection between Yahoo! and Melbourne IT:
Yahoo! Small Business

Thanks all for your messages. I too had an issue with Yahoo - I had a bunch of personal messages saved on Yahoo, and thought they would be able to remain there for quite some time. I also had groups that I had formed on Yahoo, and those went too - all for some "unknown" reason - I spoke to the folks at Yahoo customer care, and all they said was read section 6 of their terms of service, and you'll figure out what happened, or for more specific reasons, file litigation.

Lot of help they are!

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JG
Credit Cards, NJ - Your Smart Choice for Merchant Services

I don't mean to be cruel but the old cliche "you get what you pay for" is true with free email providers like Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail.

They've all had their share of screwups -- i run a few discussion lists and 99% of complaints come from people with one of those big 3. They're fine for personal use but i would never rely on them for a business or long-term contacts.

I second the idea to pay for an account where you can do your own backups.
My preferred method is via IMAP instead of POP -- that way i automatically have a copy on both the server and my own harddrive(s) at all times.