Yahoo to kill moribund email addresses, revive them for others
Days before summer arrives, Yahoo is launching a spring cleaning.
The Web services provider plans to delete all usernames that haven’t been used in the last year, hoping to free up highly sought after email addresses for its more regular customers.
“If you’re like me, you want a Yahoo! ID that’s short, sweet and memorable like albert@yahoo.com instead of albert9330399@yahoo.com,” Jay Rossiter, Yahoo’s senior vice president for platforms, said in a post on Tumblr, which Yahoo recently acquired for $1.1 billion.
To be spared from Yahoo’s purge, inactive users must log in by July 15. Regulars users will then be able to try to reserve some of the freed up names. In mid-August, users will find out if they received one of the freed logins.
Yahoo did not specify how many account names might become available. It’s also unclear both if data from the deleted accounts would be saved somewhere and if users would be able to completely link their old account to the new username. Yahoo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Rossiter described the cleansing as Yahoo’s latest big push this year to upgrade its services. Yahoo recently pushed all of its users to a newer version of its email system, and the website also received a redesign last week.
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