How to delete your Yahoo account permanently

You might not be using your Yahoo account anymore and want to clean up your digital presence. Or you might be concerned about Yahoo’s data breaches; one of which happened in 2013 and is considered the biggest breach in history, affecting all three billion of Yahoo’s accounts. Whatever your reasons, here is how to delete your Yahoo account once and for all.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to deactivate your Yahoo email permanently.

Before deleting your Yahoo account

Before you proceed to permanently delete Yahoo mail, you should understand that other services such as Flickr, Yahoo Messenger, and My Yahoo are connected to it. By deactivating Yahoo mail, you’re also giving up your use of these services under the same account and whatever you have stored in them.

Be sure to download any emails or other data you might need and cancel any premium Yahoo services that you pay for. You’ll also need to pay any outstanding bills from Yahoo if you want to close your account and in fact can only do so after you’ve had nothing owed for 90 days.

Delete your Yahoo account

1. Navigate to the Yahoo email account termination page and log in with your username and password.
2. Scroll down (and even read!) the fine print about deleting your account, then click the “Continue delete my account” button.
3. Next, you should see a confirmation screen from Yahoo that gives you one last chance to change your mind. At this stage, you must input your email address again and click on “Yes, terminate this account”.4. Your account is now officially deleted—but there is a grace period when you could reactivate it. Read on…

When will my Yahoo account be deleted?

Once you have confirmed that you want to delete your Yahoo mail account, your emails and other services (like Flickr) won’t be accessible anymore. However, Yahoo takes 30 days to make the deletion permanent. It takes 90 days for accounts registered in Australia, India, or New Zealand.

This waiting period gives you time to reactivate your Yahoo email account of you change your mind. All you have to do is log in to the service again with the same username and password as before. However, if you do nothing, then your account will be terminated permanently, and there’s no possibility of recovering your account.

While Yahoo claims it removes most data from its servers, it does admit that some of it remains. Visit the Data Storage and Anonymization support page for further clarification.

Yahoo data breach

On September 22, 2016, Yahoo revealed that a third party had stolen details from over 500 million Yahoo user accounts in late 2014. On December 14, 2016, the company announced a separate breach involving the accounts of 1 billion Yahoo users, which took place in August 2013.

Yahoo later determined that this breach actually affected all its users at that time, a whopping 3 billion accounts.

Data stolen in Yahoo’s data breaches

In both data-breach incidents, the stolen data included personal information such as names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers. Yahoo stated that the stolen data did not include users’ bank account details or credit card information.

Yahoo also disclosed that hackers had created forged cookies that would allow them to access users’ accounts without a password. Yahoo has since invalidated the forged cookies and notified affected users.

It’s a good idea to periodically check the behavior of your Yahoo Mail account. Signs that your account has been hacked include the following:

• Not receiving emails
• Receiving a lot of spam
• Receiving login notices from strange places
• Receiving complaints from contacts that you are sending them spam

What are my rights?

If you held a Yahoo email account between 2012 and 2016 and received an email from Yahoo notifying you that your account was determined to be compromised, you may be eligible for a cash payout.

Yahoo agreed to pay more than $117 million after a class-action lawsuit brought forward by the victims of the data breach. Affected users can opt for 2 years of free credit monitoring or a $358 cash payment if they already have credit monitoring.