Stefan Mileschin

Cash-strapped Yahoo thinks that more people might use its email service if all the good names had not been taken.

Yahoo announced that it's going to cancel inactive yahoo.com email accounts and let others use them.

According to USA Today, the search engine outfit announced it will give Web surfers an opportunity to claim a new handle that had previously been unavailable. It also represents a last chance for Yahoo users who haven't logged in for at least a year to keep the address.

If you want to keep your old account, you will have to log in before July 15. After that, the identifications will be available to anyone and will be ready to use again in mid-August.

While this all sounds reasonable, it does open a can of worms for all those people who snatched up important names so that cyber squatters couldn't.

It also means that you could be getting official looking emails from corporate brands in the latest phishing exercise.

This could also end up being a mess for another reason. Blackberry did this on several accounts which had been inactive for several years.

However when some users took the second hand name, they started getting emails from people who used to use the address. It might not be such a good idea to look at getting NickFarrell@yahoo.com which had already been taken when I obtained my current email address.

http://news.techeye.net/business/yah...ate-old-emails