Thanks, Barbara. I just opened a hotmail account last night. I may decide to close down the Yahoo one, but I need to find out if I can keep my instant message ID first.
Yes, it's been possible for years to have a Yahoo ID for use with the Yahoo messenger and other Yahoo services without having a mailbox in the name.
Although I may have read at one time (at emaildiscussions.com, where I've been reading and posting for several years) of someone who found a way to explicitly deactivate their Yahoo email account, it wasn't easy wading through the information at Yahoo trying to find a way to do it. But if you don't log into your Yahoo account for about four months (as of the most recent information I have on it), it will be automatically deactivated by Yahoo and remain inactive until/unless you try to login to it again, in which case they'll give you the option of reactivating it again (assuming you still have the correct password, that is). Otherwise, it will remain dormant/inactive indefinitely, and any messages sent to the address will be bounced back to the senders with a message apprising them that the mailbox has been deactivated.
In the meantime, yes, you should be able to continue logging into messenger and any
other Yahoo services (any which still may exist, that is) with the same user name, since there's no requirement that a Yahoo ID have a mailbox associated with it.
But if you've decided for sure that you wish to ultimately abandon your Yahoo email address for another address or service, having spent some years as an "email obsessive" (that is, while I actually write very few emails these days, I've been a bit obsessive about trying and checking out the features, etc. of practically every email service I've ever heard of for several years now), this is how I'd recommend that you do it.
First, send an email to all your regular contacts apprising them of your new email address (while based on my own experience and others, I can't "endorse" Bugman's recommendation of Hotmail, but knowing that no email service is perfect, I won't belabor that issue here, so do as you like in that regard, of course).
Then, DON'T try to
immediately deactivate your Yahoo email account. Since you may overlook some of your contacts at your Yahoo address, since for whatever reason some may not get the email apprising of your new address, and some people are "set in their ways" and tend to continue using the old address anyway out of habit or forgetfulness, or you may just not be able to easily remember
everyone who you may wish to give your new address to, what I recommend doing instead is leaving it to die a natural death -- that is, to become inactive through non-use. That will allow a "window" of about four months for anyone who might email you at your old address to have a chance to be updated on your new address, as follows:
Before abandoning the Yahoo account, login to it again and go to your email Preferences and create an autoreply similar to the following:
"This email address is no longer active. Please contact me at my new address at [insert your new (Hotmail?) email address here]. Thank you."
Remember, since 99.999999999999999% of spam these days is sent by "bots" from "compromised" computers (so-called "zombies") with forged From addresses, you have little to worry about spammers getting your new address from this autoresponse, since they'll never receive it, so only legitimate senders giving their true email addresses on the From line will ever receive this autoresponse message giving them your new address.
If even the slimmest possibility of spammers using automated means with real From addresses to cull email addresses from replies concerns you (as highly remote as this possibility is), you can "confound" any such systems by slightly "obscuring" your new address in your response so that it's easily readable by humans but not by automated processes, such as by typing it as, e.g., myusername (at) hotmail dot com.
Or, to make it even less worth spammers while (remember, they need to send to millions of addresses in order to hope to get responses from just a few people stupid enough to respond, so it's not cost-effective for them to waste a lot of time just trying to find one or two new addresses), instead of putting youir new email address directly in the auotresponse message you could just include a link to a 'CAPTCHA'-protected page like his one:
http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=0...=ugWwGBIYVmKz8hCyfRwcHO4efQPZwtyhuOyhNXFkviU=
offered free at the Mailhide service at
this site maintained by the creators of the ' reCAPTCHA' system.
Either way, after setting your autoreply, change your preferences to turn Junk mail filtering OFF so as to ensure that no legitimate messages go to your spam folder, preventing their senders from receiving your autoresponse.
Finally, log out of your Yahoo account and forget about it, not logging in again for at least four months to ensure its eventual deactivation. If you want to make sure, after 3 or 4 months, send a message to your old Yahoo address every once in awhile and, after long enough, you should eventually receive a bounce message informing you that the mailbox has been deactivated.
Kind of long-winded but it's really pretty simple and it's how I would handle the situation. Meanwhile, like I said, you should be able to continue logging into the Yahoo Messenger indefinitely with the same Yahoo ID, with or without a corresponding Yahoo email address. In fact, many people use the Yahoo Messenger without a Yahoo email address, I have several old Yahoo IDs that I login to the messenger with on rare occasions myself, although the email accounts for all of them have been inactive for years and I never bother reactivating them, since I have no use for them.
