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From: Mark Seiden <mis@seiden.com> In-Reply-To: <5226B31E.4080903@kenweb.org> Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2013 21:48:24 -0700 To: ml@kenweb.org Cc: nanog@nanog.org Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org On Sep 3, 2013, at 9:12 PM, ML <ml@kenweb.org> wrote: > On 9/3/2013 11:57 PM, Scott Howard wrote: >> Overall this is nothing new - Hotmail has been doing the same thing = for >> years. >>=20 >> Scott >>=20 >=20 >=20 > When I used to use Hotmail - Your account was dropped after 30-60 days > of non-use. >=20 > Whereas Yahoo kept accounts active forever until recently. >=20 as an ex yahoo security guy for many years, my recollection is this = isn't the case. starting 8-10 years ago accounts which went dormant for extended times = had actions taken on them. e.g. free accounts not logged into for a while (order of a year) had = their old email archived, or maybe even erased, i am not recalling exactly which... accounts already in that inactive state could at any point have their = names reclaimed, but the process of doing that was (as i recall) a manual and infrequent one. i remember it = happening two or three times over about 8 years, so that would make it a big batch about every year = or two. (several kinds of accounts, such as paid accounts, accounts managed for = partners such as sbc and rogers, and those deactivated for abuse were kept around forever in the = deactivated state so they=20 couldn't be ever reregistered and reused for similar abuse.) (yahoo internally understands the difference between the old account and = the newly registered eponymous=20 account because account registration date (at the granularity of a week) = is logically part of the yahoo id=20 whenever ids are used, exported, compared with other ids, looked up or = stored in databases, etc..) (it was a fairly common bug we would find in our security reviews for = programmers to ignore=20 the regweek, for example, when exporting lists of ids for some purpose). btw: i don't think it's so unreasonable to treat a free account that hasn't = been logged into for 2-3 years as abandoned. i agree it can have unfortunate side effects (particularly = domain name takeover of long-registered names). in its early days, one of the reasons people switched to gmail was that = they could get a better name there than e.g. blah32975@yahoo.com. (this was slightly exacerbated because for a number of years if someone = had mis@yahoo.com,=20 the cohort address in other ccTlds such as blah32975@yahoo.co.uk was = also not available to be=20 registered.) approximately 5 years ago, yahoo split out some populous countries into = their own name spaces, which made a lot more names available to be registered. there = was a land rush, in fact, to register "good names", and some people were not-so-amusingly = trying to sell them. >=20 > Granted it's been >15 years since I've used a Hotmail account > regularly. Microsoft *may* change their policies more often than = that. >=20 >=20
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