2013-07-05

Yahoo! Cares

I got an email recently telling me that Flickr has new features or something. As far as I was aware I had never used Flickr and didn't give two shits about its new features, so I went to the site to try to delete my account and unsubscribe. This proved more trouble than expected.

Flickr, it seems, required a Yahoo! ID to sign in. I don't have one of those. I tried the password recovery option but it wanted a lot of information that I didn't have, so I decided to contact Yahoo! and get them to sort it out for me. That's harder to do than you might expect.

There are links on their websites that seem like they should take you where you want to be, but they really just lead you to their FAQ. There's no information anywhere on their site about actually sending a message to an actual person who works there.

I went to Google for help and found someone who suggested that their Facebook page was the only way to contact them, so I reluctantly went there. They told me I'd need to know my Yahoo! ID to log in to Flickr.


Saturday:
Mathew Walls
The message just referred to me as "Tiggum". Is that a Yahoo! ID? I don't even know what it's supposed to look like. The address it was sent to was mathew.walls@gmail.com. I have no idea what my login information is or even when I signed up for the account.
Yahoo! Customer Care
Hi, we wouldn't have sent this to a non-Yahoo! email address. Mark the Message as Spam within the GMail client, as this may be a phishing scam. Here's some info. to tell if an email is legitimately from Yahoo!. http://yhoo.it/16mpryX
We're off to a good start there as you can see. I'm not completely ignorant of things like phishing, and in any case GMail does a pretty great job of flagging those for me.
Mathew Walls
The mail was sent from yahoo@service.yahoo-email.com and the links within the message all point to legitimate Yahoo! websites (eg. http://www.flickr.com/new). There is no phishing attempt I can see, it appears to be simply an email informing me that Flickr has recently been improved. It doesn't ask me to sign in to my account or verify my password or anything of that sort, the only request for me to sign in was once I got to flickr.com.
Yahoo! Customer Care
Yes, thanks, let me check, but the domain is legit. Perhaps at one time or another you may have accessed Yahoo! using Open ID?
I don't know what that means, but at least we're apparently getting somewhere.
Mathew Walls
It's possible. So how do I find out what my Yahoo! sign-in information is so I can delete my account entirely?
Yahoo! Customer Care
Hi, I'm investigating to see if there is a way to unsubscribe.
If there's a way? If?
Yahoo! Customer Care
Hi Matthew, the email is legit, and because it's considered a service announcement, it does not have a unsubscribe option. The email referenced is the Google ID that is tied to Flickr. Let us know if you need further assistance. Thank you.
Again, if? That doesn't even come close to answering my question.
Mathew Walls
How do I untie my Google ID from Flickr and not get any more of these in the future?

Tuesday:
Yahoo! Customer Care
Matthew - The following help article will show you how to remove your alternate email address from your Yahoo! account: http://yhoo.it/ZodJkQ Let us know if you need anything else and we will be happy to help.
OK, now we're back to them assuming I have a Yahoo! account, which I still don't.
Mathew Walls
What Yahoo! account? As far as I know, I don't have one. If I do, I don't know how to log into it.
Yahoo! Customer Care
Your Flickr account would be your Yahoo! ID. If you forgot it, try to recover it here: http://bit.ly/io0iVS | Once you have it, you will then be able to unlink your Google account: http://yhoo.it/14c2jCt
Mathew Walls
We're going around in circles here, this was my original problem. I don't know what my Yahoo! ID is or what information I used to sign up to that account with, so I can't seem to recover it. All I know is that Flickr sent me an email in which it referred to me as "Tiggum" to the address mathew.walls@gmail.com. How do I use that information to get into my account?

Wednesday
Yahoo! Customer Care
Mathew, there is no Yahoo! ID. Flickr allows a user to log in using Open ID and that Gmail account is the account used to access Flickr.
Wait, didn't we do this bit back on Saturday?
Mathew Walls
So how do I delete myself from Flickr? I just want to get my details off of your system so I won't get any more emails.
Yahoo! Customer Care
In order to delete your Flickr account, please sign in to it first, then visit Your Account (hover over the icon in the upper right and click "settings") and select Delete your account, near the bottom of the page.
I was beginning to lose my patience at this point.
Mathew Walls
How do I log in? I don't know what my account is! This has been the problem from the beginning! You just keep repeating the same thing over and over again and not answering my question. I don't know what my account information is so I can't log in and all you keep telling me to do is log in, which is exactly what I can't do!
You say I don't have a Yahoo! ID, so if I don't have that then how do I have an account? How can I log in to a Yahoo! site if I don't have a Yahoo! ID?

Thursday
Yahoo! Customer Care
Hi Mathew, we have asked for assistance from the Flickr team to find your Flickr URL based on the GMail account referenced, so you can log into your Flickr account with your Gmail account of which you registered.
Yahoo! Customer Care
Hi Mathew, thank you for your patience. The Flickr Account is http://www.flickr.com/photos/68623256@N08/ (Copy/paste URL as our tool doesn't like the @ sign.
1) Open http://flickr.com/signin
2) Select the Google option
3) Enter the Google credentials in the Google pop up
Let us know if this works or more importantly, if it doesn't work.
And so finally, after five days, a simple answer to my simple question was provided. And yes, that did seem to work, but how did it take this long to get an answer? And why did I even need to contact them to get this information? Shouldn't this have come up when I first looked through their FAQ? In fact, shouldn't it have been mentioned in the email they sent me that started this whole thing? If they wanted me to come and see their new features, letting me know how to log in to my account might have been helpful.

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