Vunderkind
Social Member
New mail owners are receiving old (and highly private) mails
News from BBC – Email addresses assigned to new users by Yahoo are receiving personal messages intended for the original owners of the email addresses.
Yahoo announced in June that Yahoo addresses and IDs that have been inactive for more than a year would be reassigned.
Experts on privacy are now calling on Yahoo to rectify the issue immediately, and Yahoo has said it has embarked on measures to ensure privacy and allay security fears.
A Yahoo representative, however, said "Before recycling inactive accounts we attempted to reach the account owners [in] multiple ways to notify them that they needed to log in to their account or it would be subject to recycling,"
He further added that “"We took many precautions to ensure this was done safely - including deleting any private data from the previous account owner, sending bounce-backs to the senders for at least 30-60 days letting them know the account no longer existed and unsubscribing the accounts from commercial mail."
Yahoo also plans to include a process known as the “Not My Email”, useful for people who are receiving emails not intended for them.