Yahoo! announced Monday that it is officially taking requests from active and new users to claim their choice of user names.
A month after Yahoo! announced that it will free all inactive email account names to new or active users, the California-based internet company Monday, officially opened a request site where users can claim their choice of user names. The process will last through August 7.
Yahoo announced last month that the company plans to reset all inactive email accounts so the usernames can be used by other new or existing users. All email addresses that remained dormant for the last one year were deleted.
The internet company has set up a wish list page, where users can enter their choice of user name and submit the contact email address. People can place requests for up to 5 usernames and Yahoo will check for availability. An email will be sent to the contact email address in mid-August with a link to claim the available username within 48 hours.
Dylan Casey, Yahoo's senior director of Consumer Platforms, stressed upon the security measures the company is taking to ensure there is no mixing up of the personal information.
"Since we take privacy and safety seriously, we're announcing exactly how we'll be working with partners, like e-commerce and social networking sites, on identifying that you're the new owner of a Yahoo! username, and not the previous one," Casey wrote in Yahoo! Blog, Monday.
The company has taken measures to protect the privacy of the users who had an email address that may be re-used. Yahoo will deliver any requests to the re-used email address based on the age of the particular account, for instance if a user resets a password for the Facebook account, a new header "Require-Recipient-Valid-Since" will be added to validate the age of the account before delivering the mail.
