OT: Yahoo email and Microsoft

Did you use your yahoo address to register for a microsoft (hotmail.com/live.com/outlook.com/office.com) account?

Keeping track of what is interlinked with what is not easy. I may have had that address linked but I do have a separate and long standing hotmail account and have a non-yahoo email linked to that for security. I've verified that this is correct today.

Even so, that shouldn't give Microsoft the ability to delete my very long standing and heavily used yahoo.co.uk email which my reading of their message is what is going to happen.

Microsoft do not own Yahoo now do they?

No they don't, they;re not saying your yahoo account is closing, they;re saying your unused microsoft account which is registered using your yahoo address is losing ...

try to login at the hotmail.com website using your yahoo email address as the username, if you don't remember a password, try the forgot password link and see what reminder arrives ...

You're not the only one

Don't click the link anyway. I'd recommend logging into the Yahoo account the way you normally do with IMAP and send an email or two. If all this is genuine, that should satisfy the requirements.

If you have a bit of time to spare and a clear head, you might read this:

That's all a bit TL:DR for me but I think I agree with your conclusion.

There's an item in Microsoft answers -

The relevant quote is: Your yahoo account may have been registered as a Microsoft account.

Eh? Wot?

Further, I have a yahoo.ca account and every time I sign in it helpfully autocompletes the bit after the curly snail with choices which include Microsoft branded email. I once absentmindedly typed .com instead of .ca and it connected to my account anyway so I guess one is an alias of the other. Whether that extends to the @live and @outlook options as well, I don't know.

Every now and again providers of free email seem to have purges of old dormant accounts so the fact that this message has popped up shouldn't be seen as unusual but as Joe suggests, better safe than sorry: log in to your account the normal way.

Nick

It's nothing to do with his Yahoo account. It's about an unused Microsoft account that was created using his Yahoo email address.

You may have signed-up for a microsoft account (Live.com, hotmail.com etc) using the email address of your yahoo account.

But sounds like you don't use it in any case, so why not allow MS to close the MS account, they're not talking about MS closing your Yahoo account.

It depends whether the MS account is linked to anything else. eg you may have used 'sign in with Microsoft' on some website, using your Yahoo address as your Microsoft ID. Your MS account gets cancelled and that website login doesn't work, even if you think you're logging in with your Yahoo address. There may not be a way to recover that if it requires teaching the website to create an account using your Yahoo email and a new password.

Theo

Then it is pretty badly worded; just recapping the email:

"Dear snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.co.uk, Your account x* snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.co.uk is scheduled to be closed on 30/03/2025 due to account inactivity"

That is fairly unambiguous to me.

I can't find any reference to my yahoo account on my Microsoft account, unless I have one that I haven't used when activating a Windows 10 or 11 install.

Neither can I find any reference to a microsoft/outlook/hotmail account on my yahoo account.

As previously stated my yahoo account is very active and mostly by IMAP and I would be in a bit of a mess if that disappeared as it is used for arrangements for a couple of my hobbies.

Maybe you have, in fact, two MS accounts without realising it. One you are aware of and this other one created somehow through your yahoo email. Unsurprisingly, this latter one has in effect never been used, so this ambiguous MS cleanup announceent appears.

Anthony needed to use a Windows MSA to remove Windows S from a new computer (so it wasn't forced to use only App Store items forever). A laptop or a tablet could arrive, as new, with that on it.

People don't really want to use an MSA, but that's one of the steps for removal of Windows-S.

This is probably one of those letters, where the recipients OneDrive storage is about to be removed (due to lack of usage).

Paul

I have a Yahoo account which amazingly I registered with my actual Initial+ snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.co.uk. Clearly there are very few people who I share a name with (I knew that) or maybe hardly anyone uses Yahoo for email.

I never use it, but historically it used to be the email handler for BT broadband, an agreement that ceased some time ago. I had all my investment holdings set up and they are still there, apart from ATST which is now ALW but they haven't bothered to automatically change it (and I can't). It shows useful data like the daily movement as a graph etc.

I just logged in and everything is still there and I haven't had any emails about non-usage

Andrew

It isn't non-usage of a Yahoo! account that's at question here, rather it's non-usage of a microsoft account which just happens to be registered with a yahoo email address ...

Probably or possibly a skype or MSN messenger account?

Dave

No need to go clicking links...

The two obvious possibilities is you have a Microsoft account which you have created using your yahoo email address. (MS will default to offering an outlook.com address, but you can opt to use any email address you already have, much the same as you can have a google account attached to any email address, not just gmail).

OR,

Your yahoo account is not recognising active logins just when accessed via IMAP/SMTP.

So, go to account.microsoft.com and login with your yahoo email address. If you don't have the password, click the "forgot password" link and jump through the hoops. This will either fix the problem, or identify that you don't have a MS account. Then go to yahoo.co.uk, and login to your email account there. Send youself a message and log out.

See what update emails those actions generate.

(and not a single email link was harming you in the process! :-)

Well blow me down with a feather. Usually when I create any new account/password combination I start it off in a password manager but in this case I obviously didn't.

So going to account.microsoft.com went straight to the Microsoft account I knew I had using a hotmail address.

Went through the hoops to login using the yahoo address and eventually got in and it is pretty empty, obviously so I guess.

With regards to the in-use account security shows pages and pages of attempted logins from all around the world. That's today's internet I guess.

Anyhow, puzzle now solved. I must have set it up when doing something in a bit of a rush and presumably something not really needed. I only use the yahoo account for my hobbies so not sure why I even ever tried with that.

Perhaps this would have been a little bit clearer:

Dear snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.co.uk, Your Microsoft account snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.co.uk is scheduled to be closed on 30/03/2025 due to account inactivity.

Thanks for everyone's help. I just hope I remember all this for the next time the account comes up for removal.