How to delete your Yahoo account

Closing an old email account may help you stay organized, but when it comes to Yahoo Mail, it may actually be a security necessity. Of all the data breaches that have rocked the tech world over the last few years, Yahoo really takes the cake. Follow this guide to learn how to delete a Yahoo account permanently.

How to delete a Yahoo account

Note: If you delete your Yahoo account, you will also lose My Yahoo settings, Flickr account and photos, Yahoo Messenger and other data related to your Yahoo account. Before closing down Yahoo email, make sure you download any information you may need in the future.

1. Sign in to your Yahoo account termination page with the Yahoo ID you want to delete.
2. Read the information about the account termination and click Continue. Note that deleting Yahoo account will also remove access to any paid services related to this email address.



3. Enter your Yahoo password to confirm your identity and click Yes, delete this account.



4. Click I understood.

Congratulations, you’ve just deleted your Yahoo account! However, Yahoo says the deletion process takes about 40 days to complete, and it may take longer in certain countries. For accounts registered in Australia or New Zealand, this may take approximately 90 days, and Brazilian or Taiwanese users will have to wait approximately 180 days.

After you terminate the account, any emails sent to this Yahoo account will bounce back with a delivery failure message.

If you happen to change your mind during the deletion period, you can still reactivate your account. To do that, simply log in to the account within 40 days (or more for the above-mentioned countries). Once you have reactivated the account, people will be able to send emails to it once again. However, you will not be able to access any emails sent to the account’s address while it was closed.

Yahoo also informs that some of your data “might possibly remain” in its records even after the account is fully terminated. To find out more about which information might be stored, visit Yahoo’s Data Storage and Anonymization support page.

Should you delete your Yahoo account?

Yahoo has a poor security record.

• Yahoo was purchased by Verizon, an ISP that fought for the right to sell your search history to third parties. Like other major free email providers, Yahoo Mail also scans your messages in order to show you personally relevant offers based on the information it has about you.
• From 2013 to 2014, the data of 1 billion Yahoo accounts were breached: almost one in seven inhabitants of the planet Earth.
• In 2017, Yahoo issued another warning of a data security issue. This time it was comparatively minor: 32 million Yahoo email addresses had been affected by forged browser cookies in 2015 and 2016.

When any of your email addresses get compromised, hackers usually trawl the databases of the stolen login details and try them on other sites. If you happen to reuse the same credentials for several accounts, such data breach would put all of them at risk.

Even if you don’t think that any of your account data might have been stolen, we advise checking how strong is your password and whether it’s been previously exposed in any data breaches. You can do this here.

If you’re tired of Yahoo’s data breaches and the general confusion about its credibility, it may be time to take your online privacy into your own hands.

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