By Moon Jones:
>Actually the idiot is someone who just does not back up important data.
>A double idiot I see. I guess that's the trouble with large providers:
>they let anybody in. Hence the bad publicity.
I assume Yahoo DOES 'back up important data'. The problem here is different:
The Yahoo computer system probably (falsely) figured that there was suspicious
activity going on. (It probably saw my logon Sunday, while I was still logged
on in another window, as being suspicious). I did not anticipate that my doing
what I did was going to be a problem. The big problem is that the Yahoo
computer system precipitately reacted, quite improperly, by not merely
suspending the account, but by actually deleting the entire account! This is
the computer equivalent of 'insanity'.
I have heard it said that computer features that are infrequently (or even
rarely) used do not tend to be perfected. ("Software rot"; see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_rot ) Since only rarely would this
kind of situation occur, a bug in the system would tend not to be quickly
found.
Also, you are wrong for a second reason. Yahoo (or any other email provider)
could easily set up their system to keep a backup of the email data on the
user's computer. While that data, too, would be vulnerable to various events,
the probability that BOTH the 'cloud'-kept data AND the user-computer-kept data
becoming unavailable simultaneously should be exceedingly low. Probably one of
the reasons Yahoo doesn't take this precaution is that they are trying to
lock-in users to their system. If they gave a user's computer a copy of the
entire content of the user's data, it would be too easy (for Yahoo's purposes)
for the user to transfer his data to another email system: Competing email
systems would be motivated to write software to adopt such data into a new
account.
Even so, I have done a Google search for an email-account transfer service.
(Turns out they exist!). What I'd really like to do is to obtain a new email
address, but simultaneously maintain 'jamesdbell8' as one email address,
instructing yahoo to automatically transfer any incoming mail to a second
address. This feature would greatly ease the difficulty of transferring to a
different email account.
Jim Bell
On Thursday, January 30, 2014 12:02 PM, Moon Jones <[email protected]>
wrote:
Actually the idiot is someone who just does not back up important data.
A double idiot I see. I guess that's the trouble with large providers:
they let anybody in. Hence the bad publicity.
On Thu, Jan 30, 2014, at 18:44, jim bell wrote:
> My email provider, the idiots at Yahoo.com, crashed my email address
> account '[email protected]' last Sunday. I have lost my email
> addresses, as well as all emails. For now, I will have to operate on a
> new email address, '[email protected]'. At this point, Yahoo is my
> #1 enemy, and I expect them to be "The first against the wall when the
> revolution comes".
> Jim Bell
