How to Delete a Yahoo Account

Note: If you delete your Yahoo account, you will also lose access to your My Yahoo settings, your Flickr account and photos, Yahoo Messenger, and any other information associated with your Yahoo account. Download any information you may need in the future prior to shutting down Yahoo email. Ensure that you are certain about deleting your Yahoo! email account.

1. Sign in to your Yahoo account termination page with the Yahoo ID you want to delete.
2. Click “Continue” after reviewing the account termination information. Please be aware that deleting your Yahoo account will also terminate access to any paid services associated with this email address.
3. Enter your Yahoo password to confirm your identity and click “Yes, terminate this account.”
4. Click “Got it.”

Users in Taiwan must wait around 180 days. It can be a headache to remove a Yahoo! account on occasion.

After you terminate the account, any emails sent to this Yahoo account will bounce back with a message indicating that delivery was unsuccessful.

During the deletion period, you can still reactivate your account if you change your mind. To do so, log onto the account within forty days (or more for the above-mentioned countries). Once the account has been reactivated, people will once again be able to send emails to it. However, you will not have access to any emails sent to the account’s address during its closure. It can be very inconvenient, so double-check that you want to delete your Yahoo! email account.

Yahoo warns that some of your information “may possibly remain” in its records even after the account has been completely deactivated. Visit Yahoo’s Data Storage and Anonymization support page to learn more about the information that could be stored.

Should you delete your Yahoo account?

Due to Yahoo’s poor security record, it is understandable if a user wishes to close their Yahoo! account.

• Verizon, an ISP that fought for the right to sell your search history to third parties, acquired Yahoo. Yahoo Mail, like other major free email providers, scans your messages to display personalized advertisements based on the information it has about you.
• From 2013 to 2014, the data of 1 billion Yahoo accounts were breached: almost one in seven inhabitants of the planet Earth.
• In 2017, Yahoo issued another warning of a data security issue. This time it was comparatively minor: 32 million Yahoo email addresses had been affected by forged browser cookies in 2015 and 2016.

When one of your email addresses is compromised, hackers typically comb through databases of stolen login credentials and attempt to use them on other sites. If you use the same credentials for multiple accounts, a data breach would compromise all of them.

Even if you do not believe that any of your account information has been compromised, you should check the strength of your password and whether it has been exposed in previous data breaches.