A friend is locked out of his Yahoo mail account. His recovery email is an account he doesn’t recognize, so sending a recovery code to it won’t help. There doesn’t seem to be a way to contact a human for help; even Yahoo chat is just a robot. The help faqs suggest upgrading to Yahoo Pro mail ($$) to get human help. Anyone have ideas for unlocking his account?
Yahoo Mail is a pain to deal with. Yahoo started as a web portal, something of a precursor to a search engine. It was involved in a string of controversies, toyed with buying Google, was courted by Microsoft, ended up using Google for Yahoo’s own search service, got in trouble for working with the Chinese government, was purchased by Verizon which shut down many of its services, was purchased by an investment firm, etc. The current Yahoo has had significant security problems, including data breaches that exposed three billion user accounts. Many of those accounts were hijacked by outside parties who took control of the accounts. If your friend is locked out and does not recognize the recovery email address, it could be one of these hijacked accounts. And if it is a free account, Yahoo will not invest any time or effort in the recovery.
I, myself, would avoid using any Yahoo services, or AOL services (Yahoo and AOL are both owned by the same entity). Without a valid recovery address, your friend may be stuck.
I wonder if just getting the PRO version for a month to get help and then going back to the free version will do the trick…
Thanks for the input. I’ve suggested he switch to Apple mail.😳