This article was published on October 23, 2014

Facebook and Yahoo team up to keep recycled email addresses from compromising other accounts


Facebook and Yahoo team up to keep recycled email addresses from compromising other accounts

Remember when Yahoo released all those in-active email address? Yeah, that was kind of a mess because any accounts tied to those email addresses were now in the hands of the new owners. Well Facebook was watching and teamed up with Yahoo to make sure your old Hotmail, Yahoo or AOL account doesn’t offer a convenient way for your accounts to get hijacked.

Today Facebook announced a new email standard called RRVS (Require-Recipient-Valid-Since). It inserts timestamps into emails to help determine if the account has changed hands since the last time the receiver got an email from said account.

The RRVS standard will act as an extension to the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).

Facebook stated in a post about the partnership:

Working with our counterparts at Yahoo, we quickly proposed and prototyped an enhancement to email that addresses this problem. The enhancement inserts a timestamp within an email message to indicate when we last confirmed the ownership of a Yahoo account. If the account changed hands since our last confirmation, Yahoo can just drop the message, preventing delivery of sensitive messages to the wrong hands.

It’s also probably a good idea to disconnect all those old accounts from dormant email addresses. No one wants to lose access to their LiveJournal account.

➤ Protecting Facebook Accounts With New Email Standard [Facebook]

Image credit: Shutterstock

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