Yahoo! Timestamps! Now! Block! Facebook! Email! Snoops! Facebook has begun using a Yahoo! email standard created in August last year to prevent snooping through the acquisition of old addresses. The standard dubbed dryly Require-Recipient-Valid-Since (RRVS) informs Facebook and others of the last point in time ownership of an email address was known. Facebook software engineer …
I picked up an email account from my ISP that had previously been owned by someone else. It has been funny getting all his emails about his Masonic Lodge meetings and invites to Bowls tournaments.
It does flag up a problem though. Not many of the companies out there who had this address registered had any kinds of sensible policy for deleting old accounts. A company would send me spam for the old account holder, I'd login to that account after a password reset, but then what next? I can't change the email address to the "correct" one as I didn't know the person's new address. And I can't instruct the company holding that account to delete the account as it wasn't my account. It did leave an interesting legal puzzle.
You just unsubscribe from the email, send a reply saying the account holder has changed or create a rule to automatically delete emails from those senders.
I'd have thought that knowingly logging into someone else's account without permission has already broken your intersting legal puzzle, by being illegal in itself.
I'm having a similar problem, having taken over a work colleagues email, now they've left. They were using it for personal, as well as work stuff. As so many people do. So I'm still forwarding on quite a few emails, and hitting unsubscribe on his instructions to everything else. Even there, certain sites won't allow you to unsubscribe without logging in with a password - so they also have to be forwarded on for him to deal with. After a month, it's down to a couple a day now. Perhaps the better answer would have been to bounce it, but we wanted the work ones, so didn't.
Back when I still valued my yahoo email address but had forgotten the password, I had to try to create a new account with that email address every month. After several years, yahoo!, it worked and I had my original yahoo email address back. Unfortunately, they changed their ToS a couple of months later and I deleted the account.
Years ago, I set up a new Hotmail account using my initials for a username. It turned out the previous user of that address had been using it on ... lesbian dating sites. The mail tailed off after a while though.
I still have a Yahoo account, but never use it for anything except contacting the two friends who use Yahoo Messenger for IM purposes. The email client causes me enough headaches just from my mother's insistence on using it ("How do I forward attachments?" etc, when they randomly shuffle UI components and break functionality every other week...)
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