*stunned*

[meteordust]

Your Yahoo! Mail account is no longer active.

Why is my account inactive?

Yahoo! Mail deactivated your mail account because:

* You have not logged into your mail account during the past four months; or
* You have requested that Yahoo! Mail deactivate your account.

What does this mean?

* All email messages, folders, attachments and preferences have been deleted and cannot be recovered.
* All messages sent to your Yahoo! Mail account are being returned to the sender.
* You can still use your Yahoo! ID to access other registered services on Yahoo!.


My Yahoo! account was my fandom account. My second oldest surviving email account, after my Hotmail one. I can't even remember how far back it went - six, seven, eight years? Long enough to accumulate a small mountain of emails that formed a mental photo album of those blissful times.

Saved messages from the succession of mailing lists I joined, with their humorous, insightful, or otherwise memorable exchanges. Correspondence with fellow fans, and the excitement of discovering someone else who liked RG Veda! or Zetsuai! or Gravitation! The joy of reaching out, and having others reaching back. Wonderful thank you notes from people who'd come across translations I'd done and took the time to write and express their appreciation. Tentative emails to writers whose work I admired. The thrill of receiving an actual reply! Later, feedback for my own efforts - and each and every time still bringing a spike of happiness. Some of these emails, at least, I printed out and kept. I am thankful, so thankful, for this.

Time passed. Other things started eating up my days. In the last year or two, I grew to checking my Yahoo! account less and less often. But - four months? Seriously? I didn't realise. My own damn fault, and I should be kicking myself for my stupidity, but all I can feel is a kind of numb resignation.

I don't even know if I can mentally reconstruct what I had - the people in my address book, the names of my saved messages folders, the mailing lists I was subscribed to. You might say that if I can't even remember what was there, am I really going to miss it? But that was the point. I didn't have to remember it all, because I could always go back and look it up again. But now a huge chunk of my memories is just gone.

I guess this is how people feel when their hard drives blow up.

I've just gone and reactivated my account now. It breaks my heart to see all those empty, empty folders.

Comments

[ingridmatthews.livejournal.com]

*nods* This happened to me a couple of times, until I got a Dynadvance Notifier, which logs into the accounts daily, even if I don't look at them.

This way, they'll never been deactivated. Because four months goes by pretty quick.

[meteordust.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a useful service. I'll have to look into it.

On paper, four months seems like a dreadfully long time not to check an email account (especially for anyone unlucky enough to be waiting for a response). But yeah, in an eyeblink.

[xfire.livejournal.com]

Yow.

This is why I don't like relying on web services for my mail.

Instead, I've lost mail when people have torn the hosts offline. Although, I'm liable to get a lot of that back at least.

[meteordust.livejournal.com]

One of the things I like about webmail is that it lets me access archived mail messages from anywhere, not just my home PC. But yeah, some disadvantages too...

D:

[hopexd.livejournal.com]

That's what yahoo mail did to me last year too. =_= I didn't have a lot of important information in there, but losing the address book was a big shame since a lot of old Uni contact was in there... *kicks Yahoo* I think it used to be 6 months... now only 4 months??

At last let me quote this old chinese saying: 舊的不去，新的不來...

Re: D:

[meteordust.livejournal.com]

True enough. I'm sure it will only be a matter of time before I build up even more saved messages than before... ^^;

I guess the important thing is that I got to enjoy reading those emails in the first place, even if I don't have copies of them anymore.

[pei-ayanami.livejournal.com]

Condolences ;_;

Don't get too upset over it though... you know it's got to go someday. Just like everything else. And yup, I was feeling terrible for days, even weeks when my old computer + harddrive died.

[meteordust.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the condolences. It was a big shock when I found out, but I'm all right now. Compared with other stuff in life, losing an archive of emails is a pretty trivial matter, and I'm keeping that in mind.

[sentxd.livejournal.com]

It's pretty crap that they only tell you AFTER they delete all your email.

You guys should use POP to access your yahoo accounts via a normal email client. Or is it only yahoo jp that offers that? o_o;

[hopexd.livejournal.com]

The last time i checked... which was a while back... was that only POP access was given, and no SMTP... which meant it's just more inconvenient coz you cannot reply to the email. >.>

[sentxd.livejournal.com]

Actually, I get both POP and SMTP access for both Yahoo JP and GMail. I don't log into the web versions unless I want to get my mail before I get home. The fact is I don't have an ISP mail account any more o.o;

[meteordust.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm not too impressed with Yahoo's service - I would have expected a time period when you could reactivate your account and restore everything. In an age where you expect businesses to back everything up, there's a special kind of horror in the words "deleted and cannot be recovered".

Will definitely be checking my accounts more frequently now.

[sentxd.livejournal.com]

It's definitely poor service especially from a data vendor perspective.