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Comment by somesay | Hacker News Reader

Well, the Internet is dynamic isn't it? Other services are already freeing inactive accounts, email or e.g. Twitter handles, and think of changing mail service owners and domain changes, too. And why should a service hold an email forever, just because someone registered it and maybe was never even using it?

Isn't the real problem that users and services put too much trust in plain email addresses? Especially when accounts are outdated? Crypto might help here someday in the future.

We could even say: Isn't it your fault that you didn't keep track on which services you used that email? Or that you lost your password? Why blame Yahoo for that?

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Because for better or worse, email has become the defacto identity identifier on the web. If you allow people to grab emails that used to be owned by someone else, you effectively allow them to own their identity on every website where they registered with that email in the past.

And while some other email providers do the same, it's particularly bad with yahoo because they are such a huge and longstanding provider, they have tons of email, some that are a decade old, and a lot owned by people who are not very technical or who don't check their email very often.

Still, we can't blame Yahoo for that, right? We can't blame them for peoples Internet incompetence. We can't blame them for the limited scope most service developers have.

As I user, I have to update my email address I use and other services should delete inactive accounts, too. Or at least notify inactive users. I know, especially the latter option is more or less inexistent. But although think of all the data that users have no access to, because of lost passwords etc. I rather see that deleted.

Also, if Yahoo is doing things right, they would only delete accounts with no activity for a serious amount of time, e.g. no access, not even POP3 since over 2 years.

You can't blame Yahoo as-in "they are technically and legally allowed to do that".

But on the other hand, Yahoo is a falling behemoth that is trying to earn itself a new image; and doing such a stupid move can and will earn them the mark that they still "don't get it", and rightly so.

I never talked about the legal part. Of course it is legal since their terms might likely allow this.

I just don't see it that wrong like you do. I wonder, if there is an argumentation to really call them stupid. And I don't even think this is relevant referring to their image.

As you said, this only affects people who aren't either informed about computer topics, don't know they had a Yahoo mail at all or who simply reregister their old mail address.

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