How to delete your Yahoo account

Martin Brinkmann
Oct 7, 2016
Internet
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41

A Reuters report suggests that Internet company Yahoo has been working with U.S. intelligence to search all customer emails.

According to the report, Yahoo created a software that would scan all emails automatically at the request of U.S. intelligence even before they arrived in the user's inbox.

Reuters mentions that it received the information from several Yahoo employees.

Yahoo did receive a "classified U.S. government demand" according to Reuters which was one of the broadest if not the broadest in scope up to that day considering that it involved the scanning of hundreds of million of email accounts.

The demand stands in stark contrast to previous demands where companies were asked to scan a small number of accounts or hand over stored messages of an account.

No one knows how much data was made available to the -- unnamed -- U.S. intelligence service, and whether other email providers were approached as well.

How to delete your Yahoo account

yahoo delete account

While the details on the cooperation between Yahoo and U.S. intelligence are scarce, Yahoo customers may want to consider deleting their Yahoo account because of that privacy violation and the resulting lack of trust in the company.

There is at least one step to the process, but if you want to keep your email there is two.

Backing up all Yahoo emails

yahoo import gmail

First thing you may want to do is back up all old Yahoo emails. If you don't need those anymore you may skip the step, but usually you may want to keep access.

The best way to back up all Yahoo mails depends on your migration plan. Some providers, Gmail or Outlook for instance, offer options to import emails from other providers such as Yahoo directly.

On Gmail, you would open the settings, switch to "accounts and import" and click on the "import mail and contacts" link on that page. You need to supply your Yahoo account credentials to start the import, but everything else is handled by Google from that point on.

Mail backup software like Mailstore Home, free for personal use, offers another option that is not restricted to individual providers.

You do need to enable pop access on Yahoo first though before you can start using the software. Once that is out of the way, it is simply a matter of performing the following steps in the program:

  1. Select Archive e-mail in the application.
  2. Enter your email account address and click start afterwards.
  3. You are asked to authenticate the account by providing your password.

Mailstore Home backs up all emails to the local system. You may use the program to search the emails, or to export them to another service, for instance an email client that you run on the local system.

Deleting the account

yahoo delete account

You may want to consider keeping the account alive for some time after migrating the emails to another provider or backing them up. It usually takes some time to update emails at services that you use on the Internet, privately or for work.

Keeping the account activated during that time ensures that you don't miss out on any of those.

Once you are certain that this is no longer necessary, you may visit the Yahoo account deletion page.

You are asked to sign in to the account, and asked to enter the account password and a captcha on the page afterwards.

Click on the "terminate this account" button to permanently delete the Yahoo account and be done with it once and for all.

Now You: What's your primary email provider?

Summary
How to delete your Yahoo account
Article Name
How to delete your Yahoo account
Description
Find out how to delete your Yahoo account and migrate emails to another email provider or a local backup solution before you do so.
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Ghacks Technology News
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Comments

  1. ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
    Reply

    Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on August 4, 2012 at 7:57 pm
      Reply

      Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.

    2. Leonidas Burton said on September 4, 2023 at 4:51 am
      Reply

      I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
      http://www.google.com/saved

  2. VioletMoon said on August 16, 2023 at 5:26 pm
    Reply

    @Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!

  3. Karl said on August 17, 2023 at 10:36 pm
    Reply

    @Martin

    The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
    https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/

    Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.

  4. Anonymous said on August 25, 2023 at 11:44 am
    Reply

    Omg a badge!!!
    Some tangible reward lmao.

    It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.

  5. Scroogled said on August 25, 2023 at 10:57 pm
    Reply

    With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.

    1. lollmaoeven said on August 27, 2023 at 6:24 am
      Reply

      This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)

  6. El Duderino said on August 25, 2023 at 11:14 pm
    Reply

    Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.

    And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.

  7. John G. said on August 26, 2023 at 1:29 am
    Reply

    First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm

    For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[

  8. Kalmly said on August 26, 2023 at 4:42 pm
    Reply

    Yes. Please. Fix the comments.

  9. Kim Schmidt said on September 3, 2023 at 3:42 pm
    Reply

    With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.

    Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.

    The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.

    If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.

    And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.

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