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What would you do if you couldn’t get into your primary email account. Perhaps you’re a salesman or consultant and all of your valuable contacts are stored on an online email account host such as YAHOO!, GMAIL, or HOTMAIL. I recently went through this dilemma when I tried to log into my Yahoo! mail account and I got a message saying “this account has been deactivated”. As you can imagine I was upset. This had been my primary email address for the last 7 years and all of my contacts used my yahoo address.
I was very fortunate to get my account reactivated with a little work (see How to Get Your Yahoo! Email Account Reactivated After A Terms of Service Violation). If I hadn’t, I would of been in a very difficult position.
Follow these tips to minimize the affects of this happening it to you.
Make Backup of Your Email Contacts
If you already use an Email client program like Outlook or Thunderbird, you can easily make a backup of the contacts in your email account. Another simple way is to send a “test” email out to everyone in your contact list and include your alternate email address as a recipient (if you don’t have an alternate email address, now would be a good time to create one). Save this email in your alternate email folder and refer back to this email if you ever need it.
Read Your Email Providers Terms of Service Agreement
In my case, it was a simple chain letter that I forwarded on to some work buddies that caused my account to be closed due to suspected “spamming”. But there are other causes of an account suspension including sending to many emails.
Do Not Select “Reply All” When Responding to an Email
If you know everyone on the “Reply All” list that is one thing, but if you send an email to someone that does not know you, you risk the possibility of them flagging your email as spam, leading Yahoo!’s automated system to then deactivate your account.
With any luck you will never have to go through what I did, but if you do, you’ll at least be better prepared.
