Yahoo is now recycling handles

Wed Sep 4 04:48:24 UTC 2013

On Sep 3, 2013, at 9:12 PM, ML <ml at kenweb.org> wrote:

> On 9/3/2013 11:57 PM, Scott Howard wrote:
>> Overall this is nothing new - Hotmail has been doing the same thing for
>> years.
>> 
>>  Scott
>> 
> 
> 
> When I used to use Hotmail - Your account was dropped after 30-60 days
> of non-use.
> 
> Whereas Yahoo kept accounts active forever until recently.
> 

as an ex yahoo security guy for many years, my recollection is this isn't the case.

starting 8-10 years ago accounts which went dormant for extended times had actions taken on them.

e.g. free accounts not logged into for a while (order of a year) had their old email archived, or maybe even erased,
i am not recalling exactly which...

accounts already in that inactive state could at any point have their names reclaimed, but the process of
doing that was (as i recall) a manual and infrequent one.  i remember it happening two or three times
over about 8 years, so that would make it a big batch about every year or two.

(several kinds of accounts, such as paid accounts, accounts managed for partners such as sbc and
rogers, and those deactivated for abuse were kept around forever in the deactivated state so they 
couldn't be ever reregistered and reused for similar abuse.)

(yahoo internally understands the difference between the old account and the newly registered eponymous 
account because account registration date (at the granularity of a week) is logically part of the yahoo id 
whenever ids are used, exported, compared with other ids, looked up or stored in databases, etc..)
(it was a fairly common bug we would find in our security reviews for programmers to ignore 
the regweek, for example, when exporting lists of ids for some purpose).

btw:

i don't think it's so unreasonable to treat a free account that hasn't been logged into for 2-3 years as
abandoned.   i agree it can have unfortunate side effects (particularly domain name takeover
of long-registered names).

in its early days, one of the reasons people switched to gmail was that they could get a better name there
than  e.g. blah32975 at yahoo.com.

(this was slightly exacerbated because for a number of years if someone had  mis at yahoo.com, 
the cohort address in other ccTlds such as blah32975 at yahoo.co.uk was also not available to be 
registered.)

approximately 5 years ago, yahoo split out some populous countries into their own name
spaces, which made a lot more names available to be registered.  there was a land rush,
in fact, to register "good names", and some people were not-so-amusingly trying to sell them.

> 
> Granted it's been  >15 years since I've used a Hotmail account
> regularly.  Microsoft *may* change their policies more often than that.
> 
> 