I'm glad I found this forum, it gave me the Yahoo customer service number and a soap box to allow me to vent my spleen...so thanks for that.

I opened a Yahoo email account in '99 which was nice and neat: [firstname][surname]@yahoo.com - there's no chance of getting an email address now without the ID having some random, useless, forgettable number in it. I never used it for email but I would like to use it now to open a Flickr account.

I couldn't remember the password I used so filled in the mail-help form where I provided my DOB and location - couldn't remember my postcode but knew the alternative email address so got a message it had sent my password to that alterative address. Great. Or so I thought.

So it turned out the password didn't work. I have no idea why - yes, I checked caps-lock wasn't on - yes, I deleted cookies. I trotted back to the mail-help and it suggested I should get my password reset. Thing is, it required my postcode. I have no idea what I put in this field - I tried all my old address, friends addresses, work addresses. nothing.

After many pointless auto-replies from the site, I found this forum with the yahoo customer service number and asked them to help.

It seems the only thing they can do is check that the information I give them is correct - there's no way of finding the postcode without me suggesting it to them. Also, it seems that it doesn't validate the postcode - I could have written absolutely anything in that space and it would have accepted it as a postcode. At least I know one of billions of combinations of letters and numbers is the right one - I've just got to keep trying.

What annoys me most is that my original password doesn't work - they have no answer for this. Also, they can't reset the password and have it sent to the alternative address because they need the postcode, which they can't find out without me telling them.

So basically, the password people at Yahoo are completely helpless (read:useless).

That's all.