Ping Pong with AT&T and Yahoo!

I’ve had a Yahoo! ID (email address) for many years. Later, I linked it to my parents’ then new SBC Global (now AT&T) DSL account. I no longer remember why I did this but SBC and Yahoo were in a promotional partnership and there was some benefit. I think it was so I could receive my parents' DSL account notification messages, too, since I managed their DSL service for them.

My mother changed her Internet provider to Comcast several years ago. My Yahoo! ID was unaffected by the change, though by that time I was using GMail for email. My Yahoo! ID languished, save that I still used it for Yahoo! Chat. The rarely monitored email account became a cesspool of spam.

A while back, my Yahoo! ID was hacked. That is, someone or something figured out the account’s password (amazing, since it’s rather esoteric) so that they could use the address to send spam emails. To all of my contacts. And they started doing it regularly. Daily.

When I became aware of this I naturally wanted to stop it. That has been easier said than done.

It should have been as simple as changing my Yahoo! ID password: With a new password, the spammers would no longer be able to log into the account to send spam. But changing the password has proven to be all but impossible.

When I went to Yahoo!’s password–change web page, it in turn sent me to AT&T’s DSL account management login page; the password change apparently has to be made from within AT&T’s web pages. But there is no longer a DSL account associated with my Yahoo! ID. Notwithstanding that I no longer had the account login information, anyway.

So I contacted Yahoo!’s technical support. After a protracted exchange with an on-line Yahooo! customer service representative, I was told that AT&T was the owner of the account and I would have to contact them. You can guess what happened next: That’s right, after another lengthy dialog, this tim with AT&T technical support, which included time spent digging through my email archives to find my mother’s old AT&T email address (the main one for the DSL account), I was told that I would have to contact Yahoo! for help with my Yahoo! ID.

The AT&T CSR did note that my Yahoo! ID had been changed to a free AT&T account, which I find rather humorous, since it implies that, yes, AT&T still holds primary responsibility for my Yahoo! ID.

And so it goes. I’ve gone around this loop a couple of times now, to no avail. I’m investigating my next move, which, obviously, has to be more aggressive. In the meantime, my associates continue to receive daily spams from my Yahoo! email address, their opinion of me probably dropping just a little lower with each one received.