These days, most mishaps on the Internet are easy to deal with. At least I thought so.

The story begins. Last year I got a Flickr account. I have used Flickr since 2007 and for about two years I abandoned it. I forgot how cool Flickr really was (the community). So last year I got a new account and paid for the pro membership.

Fast forward to January of this year. I decided I wanted to make another new account with a different name. I got a different Yahoo email address and set up a new Flickr account. Then I emailed Flickr and asked if they could transfer my pro membership to my new account (there’s a couple of months left on it). They said they couldn’t do that. Pretty lame.

So there I was with a silly username on my other account, and a fresh new account that I wanted to be pro. Couldn’t do a thing about it. Flickr won’t even transfer your photos to another account. Pretty lame, again.

As if both of those things wouldn’t be super easy to do. So much for being a loved Flickr user. (Something I always admired about Flickr was their obvious adornment for their users, along with their cute little messages and such. They were actually a big inspiration to me when I was building the community at Surpass Hosting back in those days.)

Fast forward a few weeks after I moved on from being annoyed. I was participating in 365 on my new, non-pro account. I was doing pretty well. One day, I got signed out of Flickr because a girl needs to reboot sometimes.

For the life of me, I couldn’t remember my password to my Yahoo account, which is linked to my Flickr account. This was odd. So I had to reset my Yahoo password. Once I did that, I could not log into Flickr. And I kept getting some message about my alternate email address which didn’t make any sense. It wanted me to change my alternate email address. Okay? I did that, and then tried to login to Flickr again. It prompted me to create a new Flickr account. I went ahead and just did it to see what would happen. Well, I got a nice and fresh account with nothing in it.

And just like that, the new Flickr account I had been using all month was no longer accessible to me in any way.

I write to Yahoo support. It’s a very simple ticket, just the facts. It states I can no longer access my Flickr account with my Yahoo email address.

Eventually I get a response from Mike asking me to verify a security question. I verify it.

Then I get another response from Brian with instructions on how to reset my Yahoo password.

THANKS. I don’t need to do that. I can access my Yahoo account – I said so in my ticket!

I replied and got this:

I’m sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients. It’s attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.

The Postfix program

(expanded from
): Command died with status 2: “/usr/bin/php
-d log_errors=On
/var/www/html/www.flickr.com/mail_handlers/help_handler.php 2>&1
|/tmp/logger.pl -t error -f LOG_LOCAL1 -l LOG_ERR -h
flog3.flickr.mud.yahoo.com >> /tmp/log 2> &1″. Command output: sh: -c: line
0: syntax error near unexpected token `&’ sh: -c: line 0: `/usr/bin/php -d
log_errors=On /var/www/html/www.flickr.com/mail_handlers/help_handler.php
2>&1 |/tmp/logger.pl -t error -f LOG_LOCAL1 -l LOG_ERR -h
flog3.flickr.mud.yahoo.com >> /tmp/log 2> &1′

I deleted my pro account today, and will be deleting the new account as soon as I can actually get into it. Forget 365. I don’t have time for it anyway.

Yahoo and Flickr: You are dumb.

Best wishes though.

Update: After sending another email to them, I got a response from a more senior tech support member within a couple of days. They said my account was “dangling” and got my password reset for me. Then I was able to delete the account. Great!