Deleting Your Yodel Account
You have options to archive or delete your account from your account profile page if you wish to take steps beyond unsubscribing from notifications. Please carefully consider the differences described below as you weigh your options and decide which works for your needs.
On your profile page, there is a "delete account" link which will open a confirmation box with options to "archive now" or "request full delete."
Archiving Your Account
This option will immediately archive your Yodel account. Doing so prevents you from logging in and will stop any scheduled messages being sent from this account.
Notifications from Yodel will no longer be sent to you, but your account will remain in our system.
You can recover and restore your settings and preferences at a later date.
Requesting a Full Delete of Your Account
Yodel understands that some of our users may wish to completely remove their account data from our system. That is perfectly fine and we're happy to assist with this request.
A complete wipe of your account from the system takes extra effort. Depending on how many of Yodel's services and features you have used, and the relationship your account has with messages or groups, it requires a helping hand from our support team.
This option will completely remove all your data from the Yodel system. However, this process may take several business days to be completed. Deleting your account cannot be undone!
We will immediately archive your account until our support team can process the request. Once your account is fully deleted, all references in our database will be gone and you will not be able to recover related preferences, settings, messages, and uploads.
Affect on Received Messages & Notifications
When archiving or deleting your account, the main thing you should be aware of with regard to notifications about received messages is that if you had set up any notification preferences to control how you receive messages or set yourself as a "sole recipient" for an address, those settings will no longer be used.
What does that mean exactly? How Yodel works is that we have a set of publicly available address data that exists outside of the creation of any accounts that may claim ownership or interest in one or more addresses. We also have accounts created as senders of messages who wish to distribute communication to a given audience that matches up to the address data we have. As receivers create accounts with Yodel, we layer on their preferences on how to receive messages.
With that setup, you can see how an archived or deleted account may remove the preferences and settings you had set up, but the rest of the Yodel system is still in place. Your individual account data will no longer be in affect, but we still have anonymous address data with senders who want to reach those addresses.
What this means to you is even if you archive or delete your account, you may still receive postal mail through Yodel to your address, such as a postcard. This is because we no longer know that you are supposed to be associated with that street address. Essentially, your address becomes a "current resident" mailing from our system's perspective. You may still receive a postcard to your address, we just no longer understand that you're connected to it.
On the other side of that coin, you can also be assured that having archived or deleted your Yodel account, won't prevent you from creating a new account and still having the ability to see messages sent to your addresses or areas of interest. Those messages still exist from our senders and are still associated with a geographic location. If you create a new account, then any messages to your locations will still be available, even if they were sent during a period when you were archived or had already deleted a previous account.
Affect on Sending Messages
When your account is archived or deleted, any scheduled mailings in the future will be prevented from being sent out as well. This is true for anything where you are marked as the sender, including the option of combining your name with a group name.
If you are in a sending group, but the sender is marked as the group by itself or combined group and member name of someone other than yourself, then those mailings will still continue despite your account being archived or deleted.
If you archived your account, any saved messages that had not yet been scheduled and sent will remain available if you choose to restore your account in the future. If you delete your account, your unsent messages with you as the individual sender will also be deleted which cannot be undone!
Previously sent messages from your account will continue to be available as part of historic record. Messages can be sent out in several formats including postcard, email, and text. Some of those methods allow the history of the message to exist outside of Yodel. Online, the message exists dated and timestamped to the original send.
If you requested a permanent deletion of your account, the original message send for previously sent messages will still exist, however, to honor your request to delete your information, Yodel will display an alternate sender name in replace of your own. To viewers it will be obvious that the sender account has been deleted. Because of the nature of messages sent via postcard, email, and text, there still will be some historic references out there with your name on it that Yodel is unable to remove.
Affect on Sending Groups
If you are a member of any sending groups, there may be an affect on those groups due to your archived or deleted account.
If you are a member of a group, and you selected the combined sender name where your name is shown followed by the group's display name, then any of those messages will be prevented from sending out.
Other group members can take control of the message and continue with editing, scheduling, and sending so long as your name is removed as part of the sender.
If your name was NOT part of the sender name, then there is no affect on the message and the group at all.
If you requested a permanent deletion of your account, the original group message send for previously sent messages will still exist, however, to honor your request to delete your information, Yodel will display an alternate sender name in replace of your own. To viewers it will be obvious that the sender account has been deleted. Because of the nature of messages sent via postcard, email, and text, there still will be some historic references out there with your name on it that Yodel is unable to remove.