By Moon Jones:
>Actually the idiot is someone who just does not back up important data.
>A double idiot I see. I guess that's the trouble with large providers:
>they let anybody in. Hence the bad publicity.
I assume Yahoo DOES 'back up important data'. The problem here is
different: The Yahoo computer system probably (falsely) figured that there was suspicious activity going on. (It probably saw my logon Sunday, while I was still logged on in another window, as being suspicious). I did not anticipate that my doing what I did was going to be a problem. The big problem is that the Yahoo computer system precipitately reacted, quite improperly, by not merely suspending the account, but by actually deleting the entire account! This is the computer equivalent of 'insanity'.
I have heard it said that computer features that are infrequently (or even rarely) used do not tend to be perfected. ("Software rot"; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_rot ) Since only rarely would this kind of situation occur, a bug in the system would tend not to be quickly found.
Also, you are wrong for a second reason. Yahoo (or any other email provider) could easily set up their system to keep a backup of the email data on the user's computer. While that data, too, would be vulnerable to various events, the probability that BOTH the 'cloud'-kept data AND the user-computer-kept data becoming unavailable simultaneously should be exceedingly low. Probably one of the reasons Yahoo doesn't take this precaution is
that they are trying to lock-in users to their system. If they gave a user's computer a copy of the entire content of the user's data, it would be too easy (for Yahoo's purposes) for the user to transfer his data to another email system: Competing email systems would be motivated to write software to adopt such data into a new account.
Even so, I have done a Google search for an email-account transfer service. (Turns out they exist!). What I'd really like to do is to obtain a new email address, but simultaneously maintain 'jamesdbell8' as one email address, instructing yahoo to automatically transfer any incoming mail to a second address. This feature would greatly ease the
difficulty of transferring to a different email account.
Jim Bell
On Thursday, January 30, 2014 12:02 PM, Moon Jones <mjones@pencil.allmail.net> wrote:
Actually the idiot is someone who just does not back up important data.
A double idiot I see. I guess that's the trouble with large providers:
they let anybody in. Hence the bad publicity.
On Thu, Jan 30, 2014, at 18:44, jim bell wrote:
> My email provider, the idiots at Yahoo.com, crashed my email address
> account '
jamesdbell8@yahoo.com' last Sunday. I have lost my email
> addresses, as well as all emails. For now, I will have to operate on a
> new email address, '
jamesdbell9@yahoo.com'. At this point, Yahoo is my
> #1 enemy, and I expect them to be "The first against the wall when the
> revolution comes".
>
Jim Bell