On Twitter, one former Yahoo user noted that their erased inbox included emails from a loved one who had since died someone else mourned the loss of their angsty teenage conversations. But that doesn’t make the perfunctory deletion of so much personal history any easier. We have only ourselves to blame, of course: we should have archived anything important and we should not have trusted a company that styles its name with an exclamation mark. I am not the only person who was blindsided by Yahoo’s clear-out lots of people are in my position. I was ghosted by a web services provider. Yahoo then ignored all my desperate follow-up messages. “This is normal and the emails cannot be restored,” a representative informed me.
Instead, I contacted the company on Twitter. There was – but I would have to sign up to a premium service and pay $4.99 (£3.80) a month for the privilege of speaking to a human being. Surely there was someone I could talk to about this. Yahoo had not warned me, even though I had given it my Gmail details as an alternative address. It chronicled my life from 2000 to 2010 suddenly, all those contacts, conversations and memories were gone – just like that. Yahoo was my first “adult” email account, an upgrade from my halcyon Hotmail years. A notice curtly informed me that, as I had not used the account for a year, my inbox had been wiped. I logged into my ancient Yahoo email account to try to find an old message from a university friend. A t about 4pm on Sunday, a decade of my life disappeared for ever.
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