I've gone through a similar ordeal and my situation was compounded by the fact that I have a commercial web site hosted by Yahoo. I have been unable to access my website to make changes and updates.

The call centers in the US and the Philippines are completely useless. The staff have no means of overriding or changing from their 'script'. Security questions are asked in sequence and if one is incorrect everything stops there.

In my case the customer service department was not able to communicate with the web hosting billing section to confirm my correct zip code. The experience has been simply unbelievable.

I believe the best way to affect some change is for everyone who is affected by Yahoo and their idiotic approach to security, is to send emails to all of the consumer computer magazines. At some point the negative feedback will become public in a large way. I for one, would never, ever use Yahoo again for anything. AOL makes them look like amateurs and that is saying a lot!

I tried to login to my Yahoo account one day and bam, no access. Been logging into this account for years already, it was my main account for all my friends and family.

So, I created a new account and after hours of searching, found a support email for Yahoo. I explained that I could not get into my account. They asked for birthday, alternate email, blah, blah, blah. Since I am in the computer business, I knew when I created that account not to use real information because this information winds up in a database for later exploitation, trust me on this.

I explained this to the ahole I was corresponding with, and said I had my secret question, but not the rest. I suggested that they check the IP address records for further verification, and I was not going to give them my real name, real bithdate, real address or whatever.

Guess what, the next time I tried to log into Yahoo with the email address I was corresponding with? Take a guess. Your right, it was canceled.

So, then I got nasty. I created another account and proceeded to harrass the technition that treated me like that. I forget now, but I had a specific email address to respond to. My message was simply "F*&K You! I want my account back!" One account after another, they just canceled it. Then they started telling me to stop or they would take legal action, and promptly canceled the lastest account. This went on for months until I finanly just got bored with it. BTW, I told them go for it on the legal action, I would be happy to show up in court and "Shove it up their ASS!".

I must have created 200 yahoo accounts giving yahoo support a hard time, and to this day I have tried to recreate my original account to no avail. I was one of the very first to sign up on yahoo, so I had a great account name and had it for many years. I did not abuse any of the yahoo "terms". I think someone that worked there wanted this account name and just took it. I lost many good contacts over this and think yahoo is total crap. If I were you, I would use another provider for serious email, just use yahoo for crap mail. And I still suggest, NEVER-EVER-EVER give any personal information to any provider, including your birthday!

As revenge, I create accounts on yahoo and then subscribe to some really crappy mailing lists just to fill up the mail boxes. I never counted but it must be in the thousands by now. And I will carry on chewing up yahoo resources. To me they suck more than Bill Gates.