Important: Yahoo to Erase and Free Up Unused Email Accounts Starting Next Month

Haven't signed in recently? You may want to do so, ASAP.

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Yahoo has been turning over a new leaf lately, from buying up Tumblr, refreshing their search pages, making a move to New York, and putting in bids to buy other startups. Guess you could say that they're hitting the reset button on their overall strategy. Well, hitting the "reset button" is exactly what they'll be doing to your Yahoo email account if you haven't used it in 12 months. 

What? That's right. Yahoo is freeing up inactive email accounts, so that other users can get those precious email addresses they've been eyeing. For example, have you always wanted YourName@yahoo.com? But were stuck with YourNamex1989x@yahoo.com because—you were 12 at the time—and the other was already taken? If YourName hasn't signed-in during the past 12 months, their account will be flagged for deactivation, something they're calling recycling. Users can reserve their "new" username starting July 15th, if the account they want has been inactive for at least a year. Yahoo will have a 30-day period between deactivation and recycling, so emails sent to the account can get notified the account is now dust in the wind. So if you want to keep your account, sign in. Like, now.

If you're worried anything bad, such as identity theft, will happen if your account is the one being recycled, Yahoo director Dylan Casey is here to calm your fears: "Can I tell you with 100 percent certainty that it's absolutely impossible for anything to happen? No. But we're going to extraordinary lengths to ensure that nothing bad happens to our users."

Oh.

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