‘Yahoo has been receiving plenty of bad press lately: Last month, it was revealed that a massive breach saw 500 million users’ data being affected; last week, the company was found to be scanning users’ emails and handing that information over to US intelligence agencies.

It’s only natural then, that people will want to switch to other service providers. And that’s a lot of people: Yahoo is still the 6th most visited site in the world, after Google, YouTube, Facebook, Baidu and Wikipedia.’

Source: The Next Web

I don’t get what all the fuss is about?

First, why would you leave Yahoo? Ah, it’s the leak, isn’t it? Because other providers are super safe and they never lie, right? Google has never been hacked, and they have never provided secret services with any information. LinkedIn is also good to trust. And Microsoft has always been super safe and sound. Okay, putting sarcasm aside here for a moment, still, there is no innocent debutante here. Every major provider has been hacked before, or suffered leaks, so don’t use that as an excuse for leaving Yahoo.

Ok let’s assume that you have your reasons. Why aren’t you just reaching out to your contacts to let them know about the change? By the way if you ever do so, please NEVER put 1200 email addresses on cc. It is much safer if you send yourself (or somebody else you trust) an email explaining the change and put everybody on bcc. This way any malicious application or malware on the recipient side, or a hacker in the middle, will not get a free database filled with the email addresses of all your friends.

Also Yahoo has a Vacation Response feature too, which, while not perfect for the purpose, you can set up to inform anybody sending you an email about the change right away. There is even a setting for sending a different kind of response when you get mail from two specific domains.

But I think you better stay. You can always keep your Yahoo mail as a safety account in case you ever lose access to your primary Google or Microsoft mail account.

The point I’m trying to make here is that sooner or later every service provider will be compromised. Alas, I believe all of them have already been compromised. LinkedIn’s password dump is at least four years old, Yahoo’s happened in 2014. Leaving a specific brand will not solve anything. You better start using multiple factor authentication for access and go through your privacy and safeguarding settings before you blame your provider.

I’m not saying that the service providers don’t take their share in breaches, but most users are also not taking their own security in hand.