Rory, a yahoo mail subscriber, recently wrote to me because emails had vanished into thin air. I am not offering a solution just an observation. As an email provider myself, I only use the free email services for testing purposes. I can only speculate as to what happened to Rory’s emails.
Question: I am with yahoo.com. I have now had two incidents in which the yahoo.com system has mysteriously ‘vanished’ my entire inbox contents, (dating back to 2008, about 1700 emails ) I need for record purposes as a film-maker and journalist, so my work and research has been seriously affected . Why would Yahoo do this? There are no routes to recover this research, and none of the items went into trash.
It seems we should not entrust Yahoo with the duty of delivering email safely. Any suggestions apart from migration to another server? And does Yahoo not ‘park up’ our ‘vanished’ emails in their hostage cloud? Or does it go deeper than this?
Answer: Yahoo offers extensive help in this matter.
Follow this link for their solution: http://help.yahoo.com/kb/index?locale=en_US&y=PROD_MAIL_ML&page=content&id=SLN4538
My take on this is that Yahoo, has no interest in deleting your email on purpose. I believe they do not care to keep it hostage hoping that you pay a ransom.
Here’s my obvious observation: computers are machines and people are human. Both are prone to err from time to time. My guess is that there was a computer glitch. Or, that a Yahoo employee made a boo-boo. Either way, for some, it was an unfortunate event.
Rory asks if there is a way to keep this from happening other than moving to another server. Apparently entrusting Yahoo with your personal information is not a good idea either.
Here’s what I would do:
- I would guard it from anyone, not just Yahoo.
- I would hire a professional to keep my info secure. Yes, it would cost money but well worth it.
- I would keep my own personal backup.
Yahoo offers a premium service that allows you to keep all your mail local. This is called POP mail. That way you can sync your mail to a local mail client such as, outlook, mac mail, thunder bird, or windows live mail. Having one of these accounts gives you 100% control over your digital goods.
(Question: How have you been affected by “free” email services, and how did you handle it?) To reply, please scroll down and leave a detailed comment. I would love to hear what you have to say.