Slimming down the accounts
I made mention before of how strange things happened with my Yahoo! Mail account before I started using it full time. Today I encountered another one of those instances, and yeah, I'm 100% certain I just really ticked off somebody because of it - but it was his fault.
I'll explain.
I received this email from Google stating a specific Google account that was my Yahoo! Mail address required verification in order for a password change. All well and good, except for one thing:
I have no Google account for my Yahoo! Mail address.
Hmm..
What I did from there is initiate another password request myself from Google to see if a return mail would come back asking to verify, and sure enough, it did. Someone did reg my Y! Mail address as a Google account and a YouTube account.
What did I do? I quickly changed the password, deleted the YouTube account, then deleted the Google account, then associated my Y! address with a Google account I know belongs to me so it cannot be registered by someone else again.
I have to give credit to Google where it's due here: I sincerely appreciate how easy it is to delete a Goog account. More on that in a moment.
None of my personal info was compromised, not to worry. And no, this was not a breach of security from Y! or Goog. It was just yet another one of those weird things that I have to deal with around once a year.
As for the poor sap that somehow used my Y! address for Goog and YouTube, he just lost both of them. Both are closed and gone. I'm sure that at the very moment I'm writing this he's furiously trying to figure out what happened. Well, he's out of luck.
For those unaware of the trials and tribulations concerning my Y! account, here's the story in a nutshell:
In November 1997 I registered for a Yahoo! Mail address, but didn't use it for almost ten years. Then I attempted to login to it, the Y! system asked me the challenge question, I successfully answered it (obviously since I'm the one that created it), reestablished my access, and that's when the weirdness started.
The Y! system basically recreated the entire account as if it had never been registered before even though it had. After "reclaiming" the account, I immediately I received several nastygrams from people thinking I was someone else on Y! Messenger. This went on for a while before it finally stopped.
As the years went on, I kept having to "fix" things reg'd with my Y! account that I never reg'd for. Every time I'd receive a mail for something I never reg'd for, I'd either ignore it or go into the account and clean house guerilla-style like I did as mentioned above.
While this may sound like a huge hassle, it isn't. These days it's rare I get any weirdness with my Y! account especially considering I'm actively using it now.
In my Y! Mail I keep a specific folder containing every attempt by someone else to hijack the account. I do this just in case I need the information for whatever reason.
~ ~ ~
I took this latest weirdness with my Y! account as a sign to slim down my other accounts now.
Per my Google accounts, I had 4 or 5 of them. Now I have 2.
Per my Live accounts, I have 3, but am going to slim that down to 2. One I'm keeping because I've had it since 1998, the other because it's the name I want. I haven't deleted the 3rd one yet because I stupidly have linked files in SkyDrive over there, so I'll have to download, re-upload to the one I'm keeping, then delete the account afterward.
On a final note, my protection of my Y! Mail account goes so far that I do in fact pay a yearly Y! Mail Plus subscription fee for it. I consider that 20 bucks a year a very good extra layer of verification and security to prove I am who I say I am. Not to mention the paying customer always more say-so than the freebie user.
I see it this way: If you value your email address, it's totally worth it to pony up a little green as a little insurance policy of sorts. Yahoo! Mail, Live Mail, Gmail (and yes, Goog does offer paid options), whatever.. doesn't matter. Flash some cash if it matters enough to you. It does to me.
