[tagold]

This is a way worse then just disabling unused old accounts and, say, deleting emails stored there. Yahoo is going to "resell"(1) these accounts. This will create all kind of privacy problems, and potential for abuse: gaining access to other services through resetting passwords there, impersonating users, people receiving private communications not intended for them, etc. And all this for what purpose? Give few lucky ones get a coveted email address like [e-mail] instead of [e-mail]?

(1) "Resell" is the not quite accurate word here as they are going to give it for free, but I can't come with a better word.

[anon808]

yahoo is trading a sliver of goodwill from people that can now get their name of choice for incredibly pissed off former users that lost emails they relied on. Just because they havn't logged into them, doesn't mean they weren't using them. EX: i use a yahoo email for an ebay account I regularly use, but because of ebay's messaging I never log into yahoo. If i'm not the only person on earth that does this, there will be bad results from this 'house cleaning'.

The point is email address arent just for getting emails, they're used as identities online.

How horrible and shortsighted. Yahoo is actively inviting ill will and complexity.

[camelite]

Reallocate?

[rgbrenner]

reuse

[tagold]

Thought about it, but doesn't sounds quite right too: Yahoo didn't use these identities, it provided them to the users. Anyway I don't want to be pedantic here, just as long as it was clear what I tried to say, and nobody misunderstood that I accuse Yahoo literary selling its user accounts to the third party, I am happy. :)