Yahoo Fails to Restore Millions of Deleted Emails

ChrisJBrady · 4 Mar 2013, 04:51 AM

This is a warning to back up your Yahoo emails. Over the weekend thousands of users had their entire set of folders and emails deleted. At least download your contacts list to a CSV file.

This is the press release issued today:

Yahoo Fails to Restore Millions of Deleted Emails

Many thousands of long term users of Yahoo Mail have just had their entire set of folders and emails deleted due to an upgrading snafu on Friday / Saturday March 1 / 2. This includes even paying Plus members.

It appears that during the upgrade Yahoo technicians decided to upgrade all Classic users to the (largely disliked) New email system. Naturally most declined this upgrade and so Yahoo deleted their entire accounts including all folders, emails going back 10 to 20 years, and contact lists.

I lost 13 years of folders and emails - many from long dead friends.

Many others report losing important documents, files and correspondence from business and personal contacts. One used his account to track online orders for running a delivery business. All have now been lost.

Naturally Yahoo is not contactable via anything other than a pro-forma. Naturally the pro-forma for restoring deleted emails fails to cater for this emergency.

Many members have requested restoration of their folders and emails. But they only have 24-48 hours to do so. Then all is lost anyway.

I requested a complete restoration immediately. And like others we received the following auto-response:

===

Mail - Messages disappeared, unknown reason [Incident: -deleted-]
Sunday, 3 March, 2013 19:37
From: This sender is Domain Keys verified "Yahoo! Customer Care" <customercare-en@cc.yahoo-inc.com>
To: [-deleted-]@yahoo.com

Response
**This is an automated response**

We have attempted to restore your mailbox using the information that you provided. If some of the emails were not restored, it is because they were not available in the snapshot used.

After we received your request, we looked for a copy of what your Yahoo! Mail account looked like at a specific point in time just prior to your requested restore time. Your entire mailbox (including your Inbox and other folders) will look exactly like it did at the time the snapshot was taken.

Since we are only able to restore your entire mailbox, there are some limitations to what we are able to do when restoring:

- We cannot restore any specific message(s) or folder(s).

- We cannot restore any message(s) lost while composing.

- We cannot undo this restoration or restore messages lost because of this restoration.

- Emails received after the recovery date will no longer be available.

**Please do not reply to this email, as no one will receive your message.**

===

YET NO FOLDERS NOR EMAILS WERE RESTORED - ALL HAS BEEN LOST - 13 YEAR'S WORTH FOR ME, UP TO 20 YEAR'S WORTH FOR OTHERS.

This is utterly unacceptable. Yahoo has remained silent. Meanwhile it has been opined by some that Yahoo technicians are staging a protest against their CEO demanding that they commute to Yahoo HQ to work and not to work at home.

Certainly there are co-incidences of timing. If members do not request a restoration withing the 24-48 hour gap then restorations cannot be carried out - period. Apparently Yahoo's backups do not last longer than 48 hours. And the major snafu occurred on Saturday morning (UK-time).

As far as I am concerned - and I hear rumours of others' - there will be many abandoning Yahoo Mail (and its other services) in the next few months. Certainly for many this is the final nail in the coffin of using Yahoo Mail.

C.J.Brady
London, UK.

janusz · 4 Mar 2013, 05:48 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChrisJBrady

This is the press release issued today

Source ???

communicant · 4 Mar 2013, 06:55 AM

With all due respect for the distress being felt by those who have suffered the recent losses, this might be an appropriate time to reiterate a caution that I have posted in these forums before: if you use webmail, store a copy of all truly important messages locally on your hard drive, and then back them up to a thumb drive or other external device. (I am speaking of webmail. Those who access their mail by other means have other useful options that would accomplish an analogous purpose.)

Again, I really am most sympathetic to the victims of Yahoo's (well-known) corporate fecklessness, but I simply cannot imagine leaving crucial business correspondence or the only copies of decades' worth of correspondence with "long-dead friends" to the tender mercies of any corporation or email provider, let alone a notably clumsy one like Yahoo.

My prescription may sound daunting after the fact and after the passage of years, but it is simple and practical if routinely practiced as one goes along each day. Whenever I receive a message that I know I will want to keep or may need to consult at some point in the future, I open a simple word-processing program (TextEdit for Mac users, for example, which opens with one click in less than a second) and paste in a copy and save it, which then safely resides on my hard-drive, impervious to the vagaries of Yahoo or anyone else. (This takes a lot less time to accomplish than it takes to describe it.) A daily back-up of new contents of the hard drive then ensures against local calamities as well.

Yet another option would be to open a dedicated storage account at another provider and cultivate a habit of forwarding a copy of every "keeper" message to the external storage account as a final step after reading each message one wishes to preserve.

Once again, none of this is any comfort to those who have lost valued material, but repeating the thought may possibly spare someone from suffering the same fate in the future. Please, back up valuable mail locally or at another account, and trust no provider with the only copies.

n5bb · 4 Mar 2013, 08:17 AM

I'm very sorry to hear about your loss of old messages.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChrisJBrady

... This is the press release issued today:

Yahoo Fails to Restore Millions of Deleted Emails

Many thousands of long term users of Yahoo Mail have just had their entire set of folders and emails deleted due to an upgrading snafu on Friday / Saturday March 1 / 2. This includes even paying Plus members. ...

Who released this press release? I find no record of Yahoo or anyone else releasing that. Searching for parts of the "press release" you posted and your complaint about millions of messages deleted due to an internal problem at Yahoo, the only mention I find is your EMD post. My test free Yahoo account still has it's messages. Of course, I upgraded it when Yahoo sent out the warning messages several months ago. You would think that the news media worldwide would be commenting about millions of missing messages and Yahoo technician errors if it was a major issue. However, I do realize that you may have had a major problem, and I don't suggest long-term storage of important messages at an email provider unless you have a backup copy stored somewhere. This is especially true for a low cost or free account.

David · 4 Mar 2013, 09:45 AM

There is some related stuff on twitter................ possibly by the same original poster.

ChrisJBrady · 4 Mar 2013, 10:13 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by David

There is some related stuff on twitter................ possibly by the same original poster.

My OP was to warn others of impending lilkely problems. That is why it is in this category. It seems that Yahoo not only deleted millions of emails from long-standing accounts, but also now cannot (maybe will not) restore them due to backups only remaining viable for 24 hours over the weekend.

Whether this current snafu was accidental or deliberate is a moot point. I know what I think.

I am visiting the so-called Yahoo Info. Centre in London on Monday hopefully to speak to someone who might be able to action a bunch of restores. Obviously I will report back on the various social media, including here.

BTW similar reports of losses are reported on Yahoo Group [Y-Mail] / Facebook / Twitter / Yahoo Answers / other forums on emails.

William9 · 4 Mar 2013, 10:36 AM

My Yahoo! messages are still there. I couldn't find anything on the Yahoo! site that reported an incident. But there are help pages of a general nature about restoring deleted messages.

n5bb · 4 Mar 2013, 10:48 AM

So it appears that the earlier post was not a Yahoo or other company press release. I just wanted to make this clear, since this thread is quickly spidered by Google and shows up for searches for "Yahoo press release fails to restore". The Google search currently shows in the listing which makes it appear to be a Yahoo press release:

This is the press release issued today: Yahoo Fails to Restore Millions of Deleted Emails

Bill

mike1977 · 4 Mar 2013, 06:20 PM

Well, if it's important...just have a few copies of it stored securely elsewhere.

ChrisJBrady · 4 Mar 2013, 11:51 PM

So Yahoo in London refused to help, In fact security / reception refused to let me even call someone there from the switchboard. NOT GOOD.

However I got a phone no. to try: 0800 0289 562 (free from a BT landline or mobile with a Giffgaff SIM card). I then spent 90 minutes on hold with inane musak, doing some shopping on the way. Eventually a Spanish sounding CSA answered. And after 30 minutes of disjointed conversation - I couldn't understand her dialect - the upshot of it was to go to the Yahoo Help website and fill in a request form for a restore. She obviously hadn't a clue. However this is something I had already done THREE times over the weekend - with no result. And that was that. I am still waiting.

janusz · 4 Mar 2013, 11:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChrisJBrady

I am visiting the so-called Yahoo Info. Centre in London.

WTF is this Yahoo Info. Centre in London

Something like the Yahoo press release which exists in your postings only?

ChrisJBrady · 5 Mar 2013, 12:33 AM

http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/writeus/snailmail.html

UK Office:

Yahoo! UK Ltd
Level 5, 125 Shaftesbury Avenue
London
WC2H 8AD
United Kingdom
Tel +44 (0) 20 7131 1000
Fax +44 (0) 20 7131 1001

William9 · 5 Mar 2013, 07:56 AM

Looks like those Info Centers are dedicated to website listings on Yahoo!. Could it be that they are there to support paid advertising and have nothing to do with other Yahoo! properties like mail?

Bamb0 · 5 Mar 2013, 07:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChrisJBrady

It appears that during the upgrade Yahoo technicians decided to upgrade all Classic users to the (largely disliked) New email system

Thankfully my 2 accounts are still on classic and hopefully will stay there!

**Gankaku** · 11 Mar 2013, 02:35 AM

"**Please do not reply to this email, as no one will receive your message.**"

- k we screwed up. Thanks bye.

Wow. I was sorry to hear about your problem. I just checked my Yahoo email and still have folders with stuff from 2001, so I'm good. But I did do the update to the new format not long ago. I guess we can't expect too much from non-paid email but if this happened to paying customers? Wow. A sad state.

It's hard to know how to save anything anymore! Emails, files, photos. Many places to store things, but with many company fails. You can try to be responsible and back things up to an archive for yourself (and I guess we should) but there's still possibility of fail.

Important mails, files and photos should be archived on and offline. Copy your very most important emails out into text messages and keep in a document that's backed up. That's the only suggestion I have against these things. Otherwise, unforeseen circumstances can and will occur, forever taking away important digital information. However, that doesn't help you recover your important items. I am sorry.

4 Mar 2013, 04:51 AM	#1
ChrisJBrady Junior Member Join Date: Mar 2013 Posts: 4	Yahoo Fails to Restore Millions of Deleted Emails This is a warning to back up your Yahoo emails. Over the weekend thousands of users had their entire set of folders and emails deleted. At least download your contacts list to a CSV file. This is the press release issued today: Yahoo Fails to Restore Millions of Deleted Emails Many thousands of long term users of Yahoo Mail have just had their entire set of folders and emails deleted due to an upgrading snafu on Friday / Saturday March 1 / 2. This includes even paying Plus members. It appears that during the upgrade Yahoo technicians decided to upgrade all Classic users to the (largely disliked) New email system. Naturally most declined this upgrade and so Yahoo deleted their entire accounts including all folders, emails going back 10 to 20 years, and contact lists. I lost 13 years of folders and emails - many from long dead friends. Many others report losing important documents, files and correspondence from business and personal contacts. One used his account to track online orders for running a delivery business. All have now been lost. Naturally Yahoo is not contactable via anything other than a pro-forma. Naturally the pro-forma for restoring deleted emails fails to cater for this emergency. Many members have requested restoration of their folders and emails. But they only have 24-48 hours to do so. Then all is lost anyway. I requested a complete restoration immediately. And like others we received the following auto-response: === Mail - Messages disappeared, unknown reason [Incident: -deleted-] Sunday, 3 March, 2013 19:37 From: This sender is Domain Keys verified "Yahoo! Customer Care" <customercare-en@cc.yahoo-inc.com> To: [-deleted-]@yahoo.com Response This is an automated response We have attempted to restore your mailbox using the information that you provided. If some of the emails were not restored, it is because they were not available in the snapshot used. After we received your request, we looked for a copy of what your Yahoo! Mail account looked like at a specific point in time just prior to your requested restore time. Your entire mailbox (including your Inbox and other folders) will look exactly like it did at the time the snapshot was taken. Since we are only able to restore your entire mailbox, there are some limitations to what we are able to do when restoring: - We cannot restore any specific message(s) or folder(s). - We cannot restore any message(s) lost while composing. - We cannot undo this restoration or restore messages lost because of this restoration. - Emails received after the recovery date will no longer be available. Please do not reply to this email, as no one will receive your message. === YET NO FOLDERS NOR EMAILS WERE RESTORED - ALL HAS BEEN LOST - 13 YEAR'S WORTH FOR ME, UP TO 20 YEAR'S WORTH FOR OTHERS. This is utterly unacceptable. Yahoo has remained silent. Meanwhile it has been opined by some that Yahoo technicians are staging a protest against their CEO demanding that they commute to Yahoo HQ to work and not to work at home. Certainly there are co-incidences of timing. If members do not request a restoration withing the 24-48 hour gap then restorations cannot be carried out - period. Apparently Yahoo's backups do not last longer than 48 hours. And the major snafu occurred on Saturday morning (UK-time). As far as I am concerned - and I hear rumours of others' - there will be many abandoning Yahoo Mail (and its other services) in the next few months. Certainly for many this is the final nail in the coffin of using Yahoo Mail. C.J.Brady London, UK.

4 Mar 2013, 11:51 PM	#10
ChrisJBrady Junior Member Join Date: Mar 2013 Posts: 4	Yahoo London refuses to help ... So Yahoo in London refused to help, In fact security / reception refused to let me even call someone there from the switchboard. NOT GOOD. However I got a phone no. to try: 0800 0289 562 (free from a BT landline or mobile with a Giffgaff SIM card). I then spent 90 minutes on hold with inane musak, doing some shopping on the way. Eventually a Spanish sounding CSA answered. And after 30 minutes of disjointed conversation - I couldn't understand her dialect - the upshot of it was to go to the Yahoo Help website and fill in a request form for a restore. She obviously hadn't a clue. However this is something I had already done THREE times over the weekend - with no result. And that was that. I am still waiting.

5 Mar 2013, 12:33 AM	#12
ChrisJBrady Junior Member Join Date: Mar 2013 Posts: 4	Yahoo Info. Centre http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/writeus/snailmail.html UK Office: Yahoo! UK Ltd Level 5, 125 Shaftesbury Avenue London WC2H 8AD United Kingdom Tel +44 (0) 20 7131 1000 Fax +44 (0) 20 7131 1001

4 Mar 2013, 06:55 AM	#3
communicant Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Jul 2009 Posts: 879	With all due respect for the distress being felt by those who have suffered the recent losses, this might be an appropriate time to reiterate a caution that I have posted in these forums before: if you use webmail, store a copy of all truly important messages locally on your hard drive, and then back them up to a thumb drive or other external device. (I am speaking of webmail. Those who access their mail by other means have other useful options that would accomplish an analogous purpose.) Again, I really am most sympathetic to the victims of Yahoo's (well-known) corporate fecklessness, but I simply cannot imagine leaving crucial business correspondence or the only copies of decades' worth of correspondence with "long-dead friends" to the tender mercies of any corporation or email provider, let alone a notably clumsy one like Yahoo. My prescription may sound daunting after the fact and after the passage of years, but it is simple and practical if routinely practiced as one goes along each day. Whenever I receive a message that I know I will want to keep or may need to consult at some point in the future, I open a simple word-processing program (TextEdit for Mac users, for example, which opens with one click in less than a second) and paste in a copy and save it, which then safely resides on my hard-drive, impervious to the vagaries of Yahoo or anyone else. (This takes a lot less time to accomplish than it takes to describe it.) A daily back-up of new contents of the hard drive then ensures against local calamities as well. Yet another option would be to open a dedicated storage account at another provider and cultivate a habit of forwarding a copy of every "keeper" message to the external storage account as a final step after reading each message one wishes to preserve. Once again, none of this is any comfort to those who have lost valued material, but repeating the thought may possibly spare someone from suffering the same fate in the future. Please, back up valuable mail locally or at another account, and trust no provider with the only copies.

4 Mar 2013, 09:45 AM	#5
David Ultimate Contributor Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Canada. Posts: 10,355	There is some related stuff on twitter................ possibly by the same original poster.

4 Mar 2013, 10:36 AM	#7
William9 The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: San Francisco Posts: 2,281	My Yahoo! messages are still there. I couldn't find anything on the Yahoo! site that reported an incident. But there are help pages of a general nature about restoring deleted messages.

4 Mar 2013, 10:48 AM	#8
n5bb Intergalactic Postmaster Join Date: May 2004 Location: Irving, Texas Posts: 9,074	So it appears that the earlier post was not a Yahoo or other company press release. I just wanted to make this clear, since this thread is quickly spidered by Google and shows up for searches for "Yahoo press release fails to restore". The Google search currently shows in the listing which makes it appear to be a Yahoo press release: This is the press release issued today: Yahoo Fails to Restore Millions of Deleted Emails Bill

4 Mar 2013, 06:20 PM	#9
mike1977 Senior Member Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Auburn Posts: 153	Well, if it's important...just have a few copies of it stored securely elsewhere.

5 Mar 2013, 07:56 AM	#13
William9 The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: San Francisco Posts: 2,281	Looks like those Info Centers are dedicated to website listings on Yahoo!. Could it be that they are there to support paid advertising and have nothing to do with other Yahoo! properties like mail?

11 Mar 2013, 02:35 AM	#15
Gankaku Moderator Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Virginia, USA Posts: 3,270	"Please do not reply to this email, as no one will receive your message." - k we screwed up. Thanks bye. Wow. I was sorry to hear about your problem. I just checked my Yahoo email and still have folders with stuff from 2001, so I'm good. But I did do the update to the new format not long ago. I guess we can't expect too much from non-paid email but if this happened to paying customers? Wow. A sad state. It's hard to know how to save anything anymore! Emails, files, photos. Many places to store things, but with many company fails. You can try to be responsible and back things up to an archive for yourself (and I guess we should) but there's still possibility of fail. Important mails, files and photos should be archived on and offline. Copy your very most important emails out into text messages and keep in a document that's backed up. That's the only suggestion I have against these things. Otherwise, unforeseen circumstances can and will occur, forever taking away important digital information. However, that doesn't help you recover your important items. I am sorry.