A friend recently had an issue with their Yahoo! email – it got compromised and the hacker started sending out begging letters. We tried contacting Yahoo! to get the account locked at a minimum or perhaps even to regain access.

Alas with no joy, weeks later, the account is still active and sending out spam. I guess the issue is that as far as Yahoo! is concerned the spammer is acting like the owner and the real owner has no way of proving that they are the real owner.

I wonder if Google/Hotmail would be able to do anything better…

It does not help that Yahoo! has no “real person” support – its all via supoort forms/email that takes days to be responded to.