When I created my Yahoo mail account 15 years ago, they forced me to put in an alternative email. Since I had none, I put in something like "dont_have_another@anywhereintheworld.com". Today Yahoo told me that for security reasons I have to confirm my account via the alternative email "don...@...". There was no way to circumvent this. So I clicked "ok". Now Im locked out of it and someone who owns that domain has received a password reset mail for my account. Damn. There is a lot of memories in this account. I feel terrible.
Something similar happened to me recently. A Yahoo / rocketmail account I had for over 10 years was suddenly closed. The reason was I hadn't used it for awhile (about six months or so).<p>The thing is I used to pay for the premium version of Yahoo mail, I bought domains from them, I had a paid Flickr account before - and they shut it all down without warning.<p>Losing that Flickr account hurt the most. Lots of saved images were lost.
Do you mind if I ask where you are from? I have noticed that Yahoo mail is very common in Asia, but I (almost) never see a @yahoo email in the US.<p>Short term I think contacting yahoo support is the only solution.<p>Long term I recommend spending the few dollars per year on a vanity domain for your email. My last name is Stockbridge, and all of my personal emails have been going to an @stockbridges.org email address for the last few years. My dad set it up, and it just forwards to whatever you like. I have previously used an account from my school's alumni association, but I have recently moved to an @icloud account, and no one else can tell the difference.<p>I also know that a lot of people love using the web based email, but I am not a fan, and one of the reasons is offline (or locked account) access to mail. If I lost access to my mail account right now then I could change the forwarding address, and be back in business in a few minutes since all of the old messages are saved by my desktop mail client. Even gmail supports this although it seems I am in a small minority that access gmail via their imap server.
Sad to hear your story. I left my Yahoo mail and used GMail instead due to Yahoo's policy of deactivating accounts that's never been opened for couple of months. But I do hope you could retrieve your account as you said that it's somehow valuable to you.<p>Maybe this links could help:<p><a href="https://ph.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080127200514AA7xKWv" rel="nofollow">https://ph.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=200801272005...</a><p><a href="https://ph.help.yahoo.com/kb/yahoo-account/account-locked-sln2069.html?impressions=true" rel="nofollow">https://ph.help.yahoo.com/kb/yahoo-account/account-locked-sl...</a>
Do this from a Linux command line:<p><pre><code> nslookup anywhereintheworld.com
</code></pre>
The result will be:<p><pre><code> ** server can't find anywhereintheworld.com: NXDOMAIN
</code></pre>
Which means that domain happens to not exist, so no one received a password reset for your account.<p>You'll have to contact yahoo (however you do that) to get this fixed. Posting here does not count as "contacting yahoo".<p>Also, take this as a lesson learned. When you let someone else handle your email for you, you live and die at that others whim.