I recently reactivated my free yahoo.com email account so that I could test something for $work. I signed up for it 12 years ago, but stopped using it a couple of years later when I got my own domain @peknet.com. So yahoo finally deactivated it. All I had to do was click a couple of buttons to reactivate account, so that was painless. All my mail was, understandably, deleted.
Within 60 seconds of reactivating it, while I watched, I got one new message. In my Spam bucket. Hilarious.