Yahoo verifies address book - Would this bother you?

[life0riley]

Yahoo apparently reads and edits address books.

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showt...95#post2268795

No thank you! I prefer to manage my address book myself.

[tek_heretik]

Yahoo apparently reads and edits address books.

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showt...95#post2268795

No thank you! I prefer to manage my address book myself.

Yep, they did it to me, not impressed. :mad:

[woodsmoke]

lol, the thing about e-mails collecting spam.

yep, I can't get into my "throwaway" account at Yahoo.

I got a notice that it was "locked" because of "suspicious activity".

I am asked to enter my old password and a new one, and then it just goes into a loop, changing the new password to "red" and not accepting it.

I've had this e-mail since I started "high speed internet", that was...dunno.... 10 years ago.

Problem is that I actually do have some "regulars" that I contact in it, and now, have no way to contact them.

Same for the messenger.

woodsmoke

[woodsmoke]

LOL even bigger!
I thought I would try to get into Yahoo again and guess what!!??

Notice on the page: "Why can't I access my Yahoo account?"

Guess what again.... This time it took the new password, and even though it made a great pretence about checking for how "good" it was, it took a VERY simplistic password!

But again, I then got an immediate notice that it had deleted access to my Yahoo messenger stuff...only I didn't really understand it.

So, I thought part of this may be an attempt to get rid of backlogged stuff on their servers.

I THINK that two things have happened:

a) They crosslinked "for security purposes" with other e-mail accounts. In my example I finally gave up and crosslinked to my google account. This produces a DOUBLING of the "messages" I get, one at Yahoo the same at G-mail.

I was going through deleting messages in Yahoo, the number at the top read 999+ and there were thousands!

I used to regularly maintain all my accounts, but I seldome actually USE Yahoo on the computer anymore, I mainly work from my phone. The phone automatically limits the number of messages on the phone... so I just hadn't realized...

b) Get this from Aug 12 2012:

Thank you for using Yahoo! Contacts. We know how critical your contacts are to you and we want to inform you of an upcoming change in our Yahoo! Contacts mobile sync services. This change will affect users who have imported or plan to import contacts from Facebook into Yahoo! Contacts and then sync them to their smartphone or tablet.

After August 3, 2012, when syncing your Yahoo! Contacts with a smartphone or tablet, your Facebook contacts will no longer sync to that device. Facebook contacts synced with a smartphone or tablet via Yahoo! Contacts prior to August 3, 2012 will no longer be accessible on that smart device.

Please note that all of your contacts - including your Facebook contacts - will remain intact and fully accessible through Yahoo! Contacts. You can also access your Yahoo! Contacts when you sign in to your Yahoo! Mail.

Kind regards,

Yahoo! Contacts team

If one really pays attention to other things., like Facebook, there are a lot of images that one cannot press and save.

It just "may" be that there are a lot of bad guys out there that, through multiple crosslinks, in a variety of websites such as Facebook, twitter, etc. that were "doing nefarious things" and Yahoo didn't want to SAY that....

So they just "cut things off"...

suffer some gripes instead of a poorly worded statement about "bad guys" getting facebooked or tweeted a gazillion times and then on all of the lamestream media.

dunno, just a thought,

But....I'm still deleting messages! lol

woodsmoke

[tek_heretik]

@Woodsmoke...yeah, I've noticed the IT staff over at Yahoo are not too bright, their software and sites are a joke, constantly broken, etc, the only reason I have a webmail with them is because they are NOT Microslop, not much of a reason but I have my principals.

[woodsmoke]

lol
yeppers!
woodfinallydeletedallofthestuffididn'twanttokeepsm oke! lol

[life0riley]

I only keep a few emails, and they aren't important. My contacts are stored in another place.

[whatthefunk]

I havent checked my yahoo mail account in months, but just did. They did it to me too. Sent a very angry email to their help department and requested my account be deleted. Its a free email service, and not a good one either. Nobody deserves the amount of crap they put their customers through.

[SteveRiley]

Some of the histrionics over this move are astounding. No, Yahoo is not deleting anyone's email messages. On 15 July they started a one-month counter. On 15 August, all accounts that had been dormant for longer than a year were deactivated and stored content was deleted. Only a few of these accounts also had associated email addresses, which were returned to the pool of available addresses for reuse. Interested people could place claims on these addresses.

All the chicken littles fretting over potential phishing attacks seem overblown. Hotmail deactivates after 270 days, expires after 365, and returns to the reuse pool. Where's the kvetching about that? Google expires accounts after a year of inactivity. Twitter's policies seem to vary from time to time, but I know they release deleted account names for reuse -- someone else has the one I used for a little while many years ago.

And remember: at Yahoo, you aren't the customer. You're the product. Yahoo owns your @ymail or @yahoo or @rocketmail address, not you. Choose another service if you don't like their terms, or get your own domain and run your own email server. The experience will do you some good

[tek_heretik]

Some of the histrionics over this move are astounding. No, Yahoo is not deleting anyone's email messages. On 15 July they started a one-month counter. On 15 August, all accounts that had been dormant for longer than a year were deactivated and stored content was deleted. Only a few of these accounts also had associated email addresses, which were returned to the pool of available addresses for reuse. Interested people could place claims on these addresses.

All the chicken littles fretting over potential phishing attacks seem overblown. Hotmail deactivates after 270 days, expires after 365, and returns to the reuse pool. Where's the kvetching about that? Google expires accounts after a year of inactivity. Twitter's policies seem to vary from time to time, but I know they release deleted account names for reuse -- someone else has the one I used for a little while many years ago.

And remember: at Yahoo, you aren't the customer. You're the product. Yahoo owns your @ymail or @yahoo or @rocketmail address, not you. Choose another service if you don't like their terms, or get your own domain and run your own email server. The experience will do you some good

I completely agree, but their IT still sucks, lol. You didn't comment on them poking their nose in and editing address books, I don't remember that in the EULA, at least an Android app tells you that up front, it was still sneaky, slimey and sleazy.

Edit: When I was a WinDOHS user, I remember Yahoo Messenger had this awful bug, it would keep crashing for YEARS, they couldn't be bothered to fix it, then again, conspiracy theorists claimed Microslop wrote in something to make it constantly crash because they were competition their messenger app.

[Detonate]

I just checked my Yahoo account and my Contacts folder was empty. No contacts, and no contacts in the deleted contacts folder. In my case, this may be due to the fact that I never use the web based interface but use Thunderbird to manage all of my email accounts, including Yahoo.

[HalationEffect]

Can't honestly say it would bother me if my email contacts got the occasional automated cleaning out of known defunct (and that may have since been issued to a new user) addresses, with a courtesy message telling me which ones had been removed.

In fact, it seems completely reasonable to me; I think anyone kicking up a fuss has misunderstood the situation. In short, a storm in a teacup.

[woodsmoke]

About Detonate's comment about the e-mails d'ling to the hard drive, for NEW to e-mail on hardware people.

One should ALWAYS......check around for boxes that are "PRE-ticked" to d/l onto hardware if one does not want that, it will then leave the e-mails on the cloud for "just in case".

woodsmoke

[Detonate]

I have TB set to automatically delete the messages on the server when downloaded. However, with Gmail, all messages are deleted from the inbox, but are still available in the Archives folder. This has helped me a few times. As far as I know, this is not true on Yahoo. I currently use TB to manage five of my six email addresses. The only one not managed from TB does not allow Pop3 or IMAP. I rarely use that one, but it is important to have it for official notifications from The Department of the Army. It also does not allow the forwarding of messages to a private email address. You can only forward messages to another .mil or .gov email address.
Two gmail accounts
One Yahoo Account
One geezergeek account
One gmx account
One US army account

I also have a hotmail account, but I have not used it in so many years I can't remember how to log in.

[whatthefunk]

Hmm reuse / recycling of mail addresses

In 1996 I got a very standard mail address from my provider (first initial+family name) and a few years later I started to see the problem it was the same as my user name for log-in.
Because we can make 5 pop boxes with each up to 10 aliases I decided to try a few better suited mail addresses like... teunis@myprovider but this last one was already in use, bummer

Once or twice a year I would try again and behold, one day the address was free
Pretty soon after registring I started getting mail that was clearly meant for the previous user, where possible I mailed them back plaining the situation.

But some of them were just commercial stuff like updates for a travel site and they wanted me to log in to the account so as to reset the mail address
I tried and obviously stranded at the password which, how convenient, they mailed me!

So I logged in and found the real name, home address of himself and his GF, passport numbers and credit card number...
I could have easily booked myself a trip around the world on his card.

Although HIS recorded mail address was now mine I decided to send a message to the one of his girlfriend, explaining this situation.
It took only a few minutes before the guy contacted me :ROFL:

I wouldn't dream about getting a mail address with those big outfits and I hate those that have put their address book including my details on such sites (or any other site).

I was just thinking this same thing. If somebody ended up with my Yahoo email address, which Ive had for 15 years now, from day one theyd be getting the worlds largest collection of spam mail. Yahoo can remove all the address they want form their own users address books, but they cant do a damn thing about the millions of address that spammers have got a hold of.

Then, theres all the things Ive done with my address over the last 15 years. Im sure that Ive used that address to register for dozens of forums, but I dont know which ones. Im sure that that address is my back up address for a number of different things, but I dont know which ones. Im guessing that at some point I too used that mail address to send and receive sensitive information and that at some point I used that mail address to register for some service which required sensitive data like my social security number, my credit card number, or something else. How am I supposed to remember what I did with my email address 15 years ago?

I understand why Yahoo thinks they need to start recycling addresses, but I have a feeling that this is only going to make their crappy service crappier.

And remember: at Yahoo, you aren't the customer. You're the product. Yahoo owns your @ymail or @yahoo or @rocketmail address, not you.

This is only half true. You are the product because Yahoo, Google, Facebook and the rest collect your data to sell to marketers and sell advertising space on their pages. However, they still have to get you to come to their page. They have to treat people like customers or people will find another service to use. This is exactly what is happening to Yahoo. When they started getting into financial trouble, they turned their once simple service into a data factory with no regard to what their users wanted.