Podcast: Play in new window | Embed
Daphne asked: “I have not been able to get into my Yahoo e-mail for quite sometime. Every time I try, there’s something about hacking into the e-mail, or hackers and all sorts of stuff. I would like to change from Yahoo to someone else that you recommend. And I would like to know if I would lose all the stuff I have on Yahoo.”
Daphne, Yahoo has had a lot of trouble with their users’ accounts being broken into, it seems like for a while they had one hacking scandal after another, and each hacking scandal involved millions, sometimes over a billion, accounts.
The message you’re seeing when you log in is probably about hackers using fake cookies to gain access to you account sometime around 2015 or 2016. If that’s what you’re seeing, it’s a legitimate message from Yahoo that they’ve pushed to users that they believe may have been affected.
If you do move away from Yahoo and use a different email provider, you don’t have to lose your old emails.
Some companies make it very easy. Google, for example, just let you go to an “Import” tab in settings, and it has you log in using your Yahoo credentials, then it just imports everything in your inbox for you.
You can also use a software email client (as opposed to the web interface), and set it up to download all your emails using the POP3 protocol to your computer, then keep them there in case you ever need to access them.