Yahoo Cleaning House, Will Deactivate Inactive Accounts After A Year

It's hard to get a clean username anymore when signing up for a service, especially if it's a fairly popular service, like Twitter or Yahoo. Speaking of that, though, Yahoo has announced that it'll be doing a bit of spring cleaning on all of its accounts, deactivating the ones that have been inactive for a year or longer.

Starting July 15, Yahoo will be resetting accounts that have remained stagnant for over a year, allowing active users the opportunity to snag the username of their choice when they wouldn't be able to otherwise. Most of the time, you have to put a unique string of numbers after a username in order for it to not already match another user, so this should definitely cut back on that.

Yahoo's senior vice president Jay Rossiter says that this is the company's "next big push," and they want to give "loyal users and new folks the opportunity to sign up for the Yahoo! ID they've always wanted." In mid July, Yahoo says that anyone will have a shot at scoring the Yahoo ID they want. Then, in mid August, "users who staked a claim on certain IDs can come to Yahoo! to discover which one they got."

Of course, if you haven't logged on to your Yahoo account in ages, but still want to keep your Yahoo ID (maybe because you were one of the lucky ones to get a good username), all you have to do is log in to your account to prevent it from getting deactivated and reset. Of course, we're guessing a lot of users won't do this, which will be good news for those that want the ID they've been stalking for ages.

This is most likely yet another one of Yahoo's tasks on its to-do list written up by newly-appointed CEO Marissa Mayer. She's been laying down the iron fist ever since she arrived at the company and has been taking steps to make Yahoo a more prominent tech company, including acquiring popular blogging platform Tumblr for a huge chunk of change.

SOURCE: Yahoo