As some of you might know, I've had a Yahoo mail account for years. Although it's original purpose was for sites that I didn't trust not to send metric assloads of spam (eBay, anyone?), it also served as an email address that would never change for various family members that never quite figured out the whole intarweb thing. I always kept a tab with Yahoo mail open, and generally checked it once a day. That is, until a week ago.

I had set up my account so I would only need to type in my password once every two weeks (it originally defaulted to 24 hours, if I remember correctly), so it seemed a little odd when I suddenly had to reverify my credentials twice on the same day. The second time, I was informed that since I had either 1) not accessed my account in four months or 2) requested that my account me deleted, my account was disabled and that every email had been deleted. WTF? I had certainly not deleted my account, and I had just logged in hours ago. Since then, I've been sending emails to Yahoo to find out what happened and if anything can be done to recover my lost email. Not one has been answered, though they have very helpfully encouraged me to upgrade to a paid account to prevent this problem from reoccurring during the reactivation process.

Now, I understand that it's a free account and that you get what you pay for, but that doesn't make me feel any better about the lost emails or their complete lack of a response. Additionally, since they kept pushing for me to get a paid account, I can't help but wonder if this was a ploy to get me to fork over $19.99. Regardless, Yahoo has officially lost me as a customer and will forever more have two fewer eyeballs to view their ads.