Asides from being a nice web account to allow free samples of spam to be taken from (due to poor spam filtering), and a nice place to read all the latest hot gossip (not really), Yahoo, absolutely FAILS at accomplishing one of the basic tasks of being an email provider.
Now, my experience so far with Yahoo was that I needed to use it for Yahoo Messaging. Well, guess what -- I have both a Skype account and a Facetime account. Whelp. That makes Yahoo pretty irrelevant nowadays.
So, I started to use it as an alternative account that I won't check, primarily for spammy newsletters, Yahoo! TV Show alerts, and as a dump-run email account.
But then, I decided to use it for my debit card. Whoops. Bad mistake...
One of the first email accounts that I created back in the late 10's was used for most things that I used to love... I don't now, of course, but the account has been deemed by Yahoo to be "inactive", And has been "recycled".
WTF. What's the point of having a physical web address, when you know that you're going to lose it? It's like buying a car, and finding out that what you purchased was rent for a few months.
Of course, the analogy wouldn't really work, since Yahoo is a free service.. But... Wait, don't they actually collect data from your emails and/or browsing activity and sell it to third party advertisers anyways (not speculating, there are sidebar ads on Yahoo email).
The analogy would be more of like if you registered for a service, that you have a piece of mind that would be reliable for a long period of time, and having it be deleted after a few years of usage.. Oh wait, that wouldn't be much of an analogy, since that's almost exactly what happened....
This message "Your Yahoo account has been deactivated. Your Yahoo account has been inactive for an extended period of time and is being recycled."
represents an account of over 6 years being lost.
But am I complaining? Yes. WTF Yahoo, that was one of the first accounts I created and you chose to delete it? You suck. That's one of the many reasons why I've moved on from the silly little news bits and Yahoo Answers service...
I just lost $99, and who knows what else....