My Yahoo email now only is showing my emails from the past year. I have 2 yahoo emails that are 10 years old and the other one has all my previous sent and inbox mail. I am very upset, did yahoo just lose all that information, I can't find a clear answer, if anyone has any info on this it would be greatly appreciated.
I'm 99.99 percent sure I wasn't hacked
Let me throw some light on this discussion and give you a more clearer picture about this.. as i'm one of the oldest user of Yahoo and have travelled all the way using it in every possible way for more than 16 years...
(
whether it was by using their email service, chatroom, conference, those animated smileys, fun software's that were developed by third parties etc.)
To begin with, Yahoo was not like this before.... during the old days when Gmail was not much in the picture... the majority users would prefer Yahoo over Hotmail or Rediffmail... because yahoo had Chatroom's and Conference Room(
which was really fun) which made it stand out from it's competitors during that era...
With time things started to change... the issues started to arise slowly since the Yahoo Chatroom's started to get flooded with bots (
posting adult contents, scam messages/offers/surveys, Virus/Trojan links etc.) everywhere on each Category/Group of the Chatrooms... and at the same time some developers created Software's that could create email ids in Bulk, you could literally create like 1000 email ids in a go..
For instance the Yahoo Bot ID Maker software had a simple interface with a browse button to upload your list (.txt) file containing the bots (
Email id that needs to be created) which was in the following format;
my_bot_ninja_1@yahoo.com:123456
my_bot_ninja_2@yahoo.com:123456
my_bot_ninja_3@yahoo.com:123456
...
...
...
& so on..
Over here the format is simple, the first part means the Email Id... followed by the second part which means the Password..
When millions of Email Ids were created in such a way then Yahoo decided to start dropping the bombs by Deactivating/Suspending a lot of Inactive/Suspicious email ids... with an assumption that there were created using the Yahoo Bot Maker software's...
I have no idea about the detection mechanism that they deployed during that time... but for sure that was not any AI based thing.... but they did it somehow with human resources itself... although it was not 100% accurate...
In your case your emails got deleted since you didn't logged-in to your email id for a longer span of period... but trust me you should find yourself as lucky... you were almost close to loosing your email id...
You want to know how?
You were actually on the first phase (Phase 1)
When you reach Phase 2 (
inactive for a more longer span of time), you will eventually loose your email id and the same email id would be deleted from their Database and anyone else could again create this email id from their official website... funny, isn't it?
Trust me, this is how Yahoo works... whether you like it or not...
Long back... i lost one of my email id this way... which was a 5-char email id but then as it was unique word and none had claimed it.... i was actually able to register that email id again....
That been said... on the other hand with Gmail, this is not the case.... once you register an email id.... it's Yours, you are the solo owner of that email id.... you can even login after a decade and nothing would happen to your email id... they won't get deleted or available to be registered for anyone else on their website....
For future important emails do stick with Gmail and you can always backup your emails locally... just in-case required...
So... concluding statement there are hardly any chances that you could get back those emails now... still you could try your luck by contacting Yahoo Customer Care with least hope and fingers crossed...
Hope so some miracle would happen and you get back your important emails...
