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Usernames and passwords of some of Yahoo's email customers have been stolen and used to gather personal information about people those Yahoo mail users have recently corresponded with, the company said Thursday. Yahoo didn't say how many accounts have been affected. Yahoo is the second-largest email service worldwide, after Google's Gmail, according to the research firm comScore. There are 273 million Yahoo mail accounts worldwide, including 81 million in the United States.

Yahoo has announced a plan to "recycle" old e-mail addresses, a move meant to free up accounts for folks who want them but that has sparked privacy concerns. In a blog post, senior vice president Jay Rossiter announced that Yahoo e-mail accounts that have been dormant for more than a year will be reset so that active users can have access to them. "If you're like me, you want a Yahoo! ID that's short, sweet, and memorable like albert@yahoo.com instead of albert9330399@yahoo.com," he wrote. The one-year period will officially begin July 15, when users can "claim" a dormant account name....

Some 450,000 Yahoo users' email addresses and passwords have been leaked because of a security breach, the company confirmed Thursday, adding that just a small fraction of the stolen passwords were valid. The company said in a statement that an "old file" from the Yahoo Contributor Network was compromised Wednesday. Among the stolen emails and passwords were many from Yahoo's own email service along with those of other companies. The Yahoo Contributor Network is a content-sharing platform. Yahoo said it is fixing the vulnerability that led to the disclosure, changing the passwords of affected Yahoo users, and notifying other companies...

Yahoo! Mail plans to snoop on your emails. Accepting its updated T&Cs give it the right to read your messages and target relevant advertising. Would you be happy if your emails were analysed in this way? It’s eight in the evening, you’re juggling a glass of wine and a sneaky fag in one hand, while emailing away with the other. You’re venting to your best friend about the latest slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to have befallen your life; secure in the knowledge that nobody’s eavesdropping on your conversation. Well, before you raise your glass in a congratulatory toast...

I just checked a long ignored yahoo email account of mine (not used in at least 6 months) and discovered hundreds of emails, the titles of which follow the same general format: [FreeRepublic] Pictures of young and Sexy College girls With all manner of descriptives after the [FreeRepublic] part. What gives? How is this happening? Any ideas?