Yahoo How Yahoo Deleted My Email Account And There Was Literally Nothing I Could Do

TL;DR
Yahoo deleted my account without authorization or at least prior notice, without me violating any terms and conditions and I literally had to pay them to maybe get it back.

It's been over a month now that I've decided to create a musician artist's profile of mine on various platforms (Soundcloud, Facebook, Twitter, etc) and to make it more professional, I needed to get an official email address. The first email service provided that came into my mind was Yahoo mail. I haven't been using this email service since my first email account ever in 2008 and the Yahoo Data Breach Scandal in 2016. I decided to give Yahoo Mail a chance and show my support with the intention of opting for Yahoo Pro Mail at a certain point in time when I received a lot to traction for my music profile.

In the life of a struggling Music Producer there are only 2 things you do in the early phase of your career:

1. You spend a lot of time, soul and hard work crafting every bits of sounds into melodies, symphonies and beats until it starts to feel promising in laying the first stone in your career.

2. You might have made a masterpiece but of what value if it is left to rot away in your garage, then come sending email. Sending emails forms a huge part, even more so than social media management, it is how you get in touch with Record labels, Mentors, DJs in order to promote your song.

To be honest sending promo emails is the least enjoyable thing there is to do as an artist, because the little time you get to create music you do not want to spend on sending emails. And we know that some replies can break our heart if we get denied/heavily criticized if not responded at all.

Unable to Login

I recently spent 4 weeks producing a track whenever I found some time and after some procrastination I decided to get down to business and start sending promotional emails. That was yesterday, the 22nd of April at around 4AM (GMT). Just when I started to feel productive, all of a sudden I was re-initiated to the login screen.

I received a “Sorry, We don’t recognize this email” message. I wasn’t immediately alerted at first and decided to try again later forgoing the need to contact customer support as I knew we are in full COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and Yahoo’s customer service would surely be understaffed. Thought to myself again, that this may be a temporary server issue.

Realizing that my account was in fact deleted

I return to perform my daily duties, but this unrecognizable email was bugging me constantly. I later decided to send myself an email in the evening.

To my surprise, my account was in fact deleted. I was shocked and frustrated at the same time of how could an email service provider like Yahoo’s simply delete the email of its subscribers without any authorization or at least some former notice (so that I could have backed up the work I’ve done).

Seeking Help In Vain

1. help.yahoo.com

The first thing I did was to find a discreet channel for contact in order to resolve this issue, so I head up to help.yahoo.com.

I tried to recover my account as that seems to be the only logical option among the very limited ones. That didn’t work it says neither my phone number nor my backup email address was linked to any account further confirming that this was an illegal termination.

I clicked on live agent support, and I was immediately hit by a pro paying support. I didn’t think it was fair for me to pay for recovering my email which wasn’t even my fault at it being terminated.

2. Twitter calling out

So I took the twitter route.

Sorry for the language but I was very frustrated at that moment and was nearly having a mental breakdown as I suffer from depression and anxiety issues.

I called out yahoo and yahoo mail on the post.

Ah finally a sign of hope, I was amazed at how quickly @YahooCare responded to me but it later turned out to be a mirage

They just told me to BUG OFF to help.yahoo.com, which I previously did.

I decided to check the terms and conditions of yahoo mail.

I also when to have a chat with the yahoo help chat assistant (even though it was a robot I was more useful than the yahoos at yahoo.)

Two things I’ve realized. One, Yahoo was managed by Verizon media and two, they can at any time delete your account without notifying you and they shall not be liable to it. Well, I did read the terms and conditions on signup but considered it to be in case if you did something illegal using your account.

@Yahoo what is so illegal about a musician dealing with anxiety issues and struggling to make a name in the music industry?

I made a mistake Yahoo, I subscribed to your mail service :(

I now have created a google mail account and switched all my social media account to Gmail. It won’t be the end of the story though as I will have to trace back the network I’ve been created during the last 40 days and maybe some record labels would have wanted to sign the promo I’ve sent them, I’ll never know because my account got deleted. 🙃

CIAO