Can’t sign out of Yahoo Mail (all of them)

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When I’m in Yahoo Mail, I ought to be able to “sign out” and then sign in as another user. But lately I’ve been unable to do that as Yahoo “recognizes” my last sign in, and automatically fills it in. When I sign out and on, I should in theory (and by experience) get a blank sign-in sheet. Why is this? Am I the only martian on the block with multiple e-mail addresses, and all these headaches?

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I never let any browser save my passwords. I suggest turning off the autocomplete feature [for forms] entirely, but if you like it, you can at least try to turn off the browser’s memory for passwords.

Each browser might have different add-ons, toolbars, and extensions. Please list the ones you are using for the browsers that have this problem.

Finally, please run lots of spyware and malware scans in case your computer is now being operated by someone or something other than yourself.

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I don’t let my browser save passwords either. I am not using any add-ons. My understanding is that all spyware detection programs are incompatible with Norton Internet Security, so I uninstalled them.

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FWIW – I have multiple Yahoo accounts (actually sbcglobal.net). Yahoo has made changes to their login screen lately, if you have “Remember my ID on this computer” (see attached) checked when you first login, it will save the password for you account for that machine. Yahoo was pre-checking the box initially and only after several uses (unchecking the box), did Yahoo stop.

Also, when you logout you get the “Return to Yahoo! Mail link. Unfortunately, Yahoo thinks you are trying to re-login to the same account (even though I specifically stated NOT to save the User Password). After seveal seconds, the screen changes to their main Yahoo Web site.

As a workaround, I added the http://mail.yahoo.com[/url%5D to the FireFox Tool bar and click it every time I want to access the Yahoo Mail. I have not had a problem since then.

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I thought I had the silver bullet, but this didn’t work for me. >> I added the http://mail.yahoo.com to the FireFox Tool bar << I still got the loop of Yahoo asking for my password over and over. (Again, I am certain it is current. I don't have these problems at home.)

Why would this same thing happen in Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, and Opera? Besides the specs mentioned earlier in this thread, I have not tweaked these programs, the original settings are just about all they're set up for.

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Maybe I am a little confused. When you goto http://mail.yahoo.com[/url%5D – is the UserID already in the login box ?
Or, after typing in the passowrd, Yahoo! is giving an error and trying to get you to re-enter the correct password ?

The behavior you are describing is EXTEMELY strange and I would suspect a virus or maleware on that machine. Have you run an anti-virus and spyware program ?

As for the answer to your last question:
>>Why would this same thing happen in Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, and Opera?
I do NOT think it would. There IS the remote possibility that the cookies were set and/or you are using the same cache for all the browsers (not likely and would be starnge). You could try cleaning out all the cookies and cache (Spybot Search & Destroy for example).

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No I never mentioned the User ID being prefilled. That was you or another person who answered me. That is not the case for me.
All the browsers pull from settings of other browswers. I automatically get bookmarks from previous browsers.
I am of the understanding, as I previously stated, that Norton Internet Security/Antivirus 2006 is not compatible with spyware. It apparently does that task on its own.
I run a full system scan every day.

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If I close the Yahoo mail tab in Opera, from which I’ve successfully accessed my account, and then close Opera itself, I can go to a new tab and access another Yahoo mail account. In the other browsers–Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape–I can’t even get into Yahoo mail. I’ve had Opera for a few months. Before that, Netscape was my preferred (and only) browser. I think I can close Internet Explorer and access other accounts as well, but I reserve MSIE for the “new and improved Yahoo e-mail” format (beta?) on one of my accounts. For some reason that format upgrade is not available for Opera.

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I’m confused.

You state “No I never mentioned the User ID being prefilled.” but in you first post state “…as Yahoo “recognizes” my last sign in, and automatically fills it in.”
Is the log-in name (User ID) being entered automatically or not?

You state “If I close the Yahoo mail tab in Opera, from which I’ve successfully accessed my account, and then close Opera itself, I can go to a new tab and access another Yahoo mail account. In the other browsers–Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape–I can’t even get into Yahoo mail.” but in an earlier post state “Why would this same thing happen in Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, and Opera?” which I read to mean they are all acting the same way.

Have you tried flushing your browser cache(s) and cookies? My experience of using webmail makes be believe that cookies are used so that your identity is preserved during the session. When you log out and then back in again, the cookie is read and you are presented with your log in name unless the cookie is cleared. The password field remains blank unless passwords are set to be remembered.

In your first post you said: “When I’m in Yahoo Mail, I ought to be able to “sign out” and then sign in as another user. But lately I’ve been unable to do that as Yahoo “recognizes” my last sign in, and automatically fills it in.”
As well as filling it in, does it log you in as well?
” When I sign out and on, I should in theory (and by experience) get a blank sign-in sheet.”
Not totally blank my experience as a wrote above. If you are not logged in automatically, can you not just change the user id and password?

I strongly suspect that the login information is being stored somewhere and you need to clear all caches, cookies and saved forms and passwords.

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When I go to sign in (from any Yahoo URL), the form is initially blank until I fill it in and hit
SIGN IN. Then it comes back (incidentally with a phishing notice) and has one of my Yahoo ID’s filled in. And
it says, Hello, Jim or Welcome Back, Jim.

My passwords are never pre-filled, and I would not/do not set them for pre-filling. I do not have “remember me” checked.

You ask if it logs me in as well as filling in the User ID. I guess it would depend what the definition of loggin in is. When it says
Welcome Back Jim it implies I never logged out! But no since the password is NEVER pre-filled, I would not call this
logging in.

Can you give me some help in clearing all the cookies, caches, etc.? I believe I can do the bulk of this from within the Preferences, but if you know of file extensons or anything that might be deep inside profile folders, any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks again, this non-interactive communication is ham-handed. I hope I cleared some stuff up.

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I cleared out all the caches, cookies, etc. from each browser’s preference. (They must all access a common folder because the brand new installs–Firefox and Mozilla–had tons of cookies.) I have the same problem. When I SIGN OUT of a Yahoo Account in OPERA, and close the tab, and open a new tab and go to Yahoo, it says Hello, Jim which means it still “remembers” my session even though I signed out. When I try to go to mail.yahoo.com, the URL automatically fills in other stuff in the address bar and, as I said, it goes to the previous User ID session and welcomes me.

MSIE allows me to SIGN OUT, then SIGN IN and will open up my different account. But as I said earlier, this does not solve the problem as I like to reserve MSIE for a certain account that has the upgraded Yahoo mail.

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Very strange. Try this thread from the dslreports.com forum.

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Leif–By Jove, I think you’ve got it. I changed Yahoo to “Accept cookies” (not just “Accept cookies from the originating site”), and at least in Opera, I can sign out, without closing either the tab or browser, and then sign in as another user. I’ll try it on Firefox and Mozilla, as well.

A slightly different problem that this fixed, is, if I went to compose an e-mail message, and called up the address book, Yahoo would make me sign in again, and then confirm my password (with the User ID filled in), before showing the address book. I didn’t like the idea of having to sign in for every sub-application of the session!

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Congratulations on the Fix !!

Sorry if I ended up confusing you more then helping !

Thanks Leif for the save – I will have to put this one in my Tips and Tricks file.

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That’s good to hear – let us know if it does the trick with Firefox and Mozilla.

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