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Yahoo addresses multiple-personality email problem

Some new Yahoo Mail users find themselves too close for comfort when a technical glitch piles as many as 100 people into the same account.

Paul Festa Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Paul Festa
covers browser development and Web standards.
Paul Festa
Some new Yahoo Mail users found themselves too close for comfort last week when a technical glitch piled as many as 100 people into the same account.

"For a short period of time, new users who signed up were assigned erroneously to the same email account," said Lisa Pollock, senior producer for Yahoo Mail. "When they signed up for a Yahoo email account, we had multiple IDs that were assigned to a single Yahoo.com address."

New members, possibly numbering "in the hundreds," were assigned to two email addresses that Yahoo knows of before the problem was straightened out, Pollock said. She added that people with existing accounts were not affected.

"In the context of all the users who could have signed up in that period, it's a tiny number," Pollock said. "But it's an issue, so we fixed it."