'bit of community service - Use Yahoo?

[Ed Hansberry]

If you use Yahoo and have an account there, please check your marketing preferences. They have recently turned many of them to "enroll." :-(<br /><br /><img src="http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/my/top7.gif" /><br /><br />If you have a Yahoo account, go to <a href="http://my.yahoo.com">My Yahoo</a> then:<br />•Select Account Info at the top right<br />•You may need to type in your password<br />•Select "Edit your marketing preferences" mid-way down the page<br />•Enroll in what you want. Chances are, 100% of them are set to YES.<br /><br />Have a Hoppy Easter everyone!

[ipaq-PHD]

Thanks !!!

[rfischer]

Thanks for the tip. Mine were all at 100% like you said. I get enough junk mail as it is! :lol:

[Willa]

Yes, thanks for the heads up. I just checked my settings and, sure enough, 100% of them were checked as 'enroll.'

[johnm]

OMG - those freaking morons.

[Willa]

First, Yahoo decides to start charging for POP3 access and auto-email forwarding and now this "change" to the privacy policy. Not that I begrudge them for charging for certain email services, but the timing of these two events makes me smell trouble at Yahoo! Stupidly desperate trouble at that.

[DaleReeck]

Never underestimate the sleaziness of advertising, especially of the email variety. Their tenticles reach everywhere :)

[T-Will]

Thanks Ed!

[Dave Conger]

First, Yahoo decides to start charging for POP3 access and auto-email forwarding and now this "change" to the privacy policy. Not that I begrudge them for charging for certain email services, but the timing of these two events makes me smell trouble at Yahoo! Stupidly desperate trouble at that.


I was just going to say the same thing. I am a little mad about the POP3 being turned off, but I guess that just means it is time to stop using my Yahoo account. Yahoo really probably didn't like P0P3. They lost quite a bit of money because people like me never saw ads because I used outlook and though they said they would send stuff, they never did. I really liked their service, but there are others.

[gmoehl]

8O

Thanks. You saved me from getting lots of junk mail.

[st63z]

I still really like Yahoo (compared to the other major portals/webmails) and actually hope they can turn around their downhill financial streak. In fact, I've paid for many of Yahoo's premium services (such as extra email storage, etc). IMHO, in all this time, they've never been as aggresively annoying with their advertising and pop-ups and whatnot compared to many others. Their services have been reliable, easy to get into and use without too many obstructions and complaints. As a bonus, they have been giving away more for their free services compared to the competition (like the aforementioned POP3 access in the past). All in all, Yahoo's services have had the best balance and mix for me (I guess it helps that they're independent as opposed to MS or AOL properties). I dunno, I just like a lot of things about their services and I like their web interface and such...

Hotmail is, like, really limited in space and stuff (total storage, max size per email, etc). Whenever you log into Hotmail it always brings up the annoying MSN Messenger app (I use mainly Yahoo Messenger). I still remember the publicized Hotmail problems and outages and Passport problems...

My 2 cents...

[Marc Zimmermann]

I still really like Yahoo (compared to the other major portals/webmails) and actually hope they can turn around their downhill financial streak. [...]


Exactly my sentiments. I hope that they're going to find the right balance between free and pay services.

[CoffeeKid]

Those bastards! :evil:

Thanks Ed. I hate this kind of stuff. You know what? It's actually illegal in my province (it's called negative opting - where a company automatically signs you up for something, and forces you to manually sign out from it - Rogers Cable got into heaps of trouble over this a few years ago, and this law was enforced). I wonder if anyone's done anything about it in BC... like complain to the Attorney General... hrmmm.

[James Bond]

Is there any other free webmail that is comparable to yahoo or better? I find yahoo much better than hotmail (the latter gives me so much junk mail that it is unbelievable). Excite is dead, and it was never good. How mail.com any good? I mostly care about 1. fast connection even from modem and 2. least possible spam.

[Mobile Bob]

Thank you!

[helloboys]

I still really like Yahoo (compared to the other major portals/webmails) and actually hope they can turn around their downhill financial streak. In fact, I've paid for many of Yahoo's premium services (such as extra email storage, etc). IMHO, in all this time, they've never been as aggresively annoying with their advertising and pop-ups and whatnot compared to many others.
This used to be the case. Yahoo used to pride itself on having minimalistic advertising and design. That's changed over the past year. It's obtrusive (lots of pop ups and unders, full screen ads, interstitals), and this latest move is evidence of that.

I think Y! spread themselves too thin. They bought waaayy too much during their heyday. They havem, what three hosting services now? (GeoCities, Servers and Websites, or something like that). Sounds liek they followed this business plan:
Gets lots of users and services

Profit(I guess it helps that they're independent as opposed to MS or AOL properties).
Independant from who? MSN is "independant" too. Yahoo! are a large platform, just like the other two.
I still remember the publicized Hotmail problems and outages and Passport problems...
Yahoo!'s had it's fair share of problems too. A couple of weeks ago, their mailing list service was completely offline for an entire weekend, and just recently, their photo sharing stuff was down.

You get what you pay for, really, and anyone whinging about these freebies going down really should think about that.

[PDAlien]

I recommend using MyRealBox (http://www.myrealbox.com) for email. It's a free IMAP service, so it's even better than POP! Unfortunately, I was having all my Yahoo email forwarded there and now I have to rethink that.

[ledowning]

:D Thanks a lot for the info. I don't use Yahoo for e-mail, but I have a home page set up that I use sometimes. Checked the options and they were all turned on! You would think that companies would inform you when changes are made to your account.

Just seems that you can't trust anyone anymore. What a shame!!!

[Jason Dunn]

So should I start offering @pocketpcthoughts.com email aliases? :-)

[JJ]

Great info. Thanks for the warning!

[Lotto]

Wow, can't believe they would just change everyone's settings like that...pretty dirty pool. Thanks for the heads up!

[whoopus]

Thanks for the heads up. I tried changing my alternate e-mail address to [email protected], but it wouldn't let me. So I changed it to [email protected] which is the ftc's spam mailbox.

I liked using Yahoo because I could change isp's and still have the same e-mail address. Not to mention the fact that you can filter junkmail before it even gets to Outlook via Pop3. I once tried reactivating my old isp e-mail after not using it for 2 years and I had 800 junk mail messages. At the time I was only paying for 6 hours a month, so downloading this many messages would have used up all of my time for that month. Since the isp had no server based filtering, I switched to yahoo. I would use Hotmail, but their Outlook support sucks (Isn't that sad). I'll give myrealbox.com a try. Any more that have filtering capability and that will still be here in the next few years?

Thanks,
Mark McCurry

[van_mierlo]

I just moved my e-mail to myrealbox (http://www.myrealbox.com). They are saying besides pop en imap that soon they will have something to sync with outlook and ppc's

[Ed Hansberry]

Now Yahoo will track you on non-yahoo sites. :roll:

Head over to http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy/us/pixels/details.html to opt out of that too.

[Lotto]

Got to admit, they are trying every angle. Thanks for the heads up Ed. I'm wondering if we all continue to opt out of their sly ways to gather info, if it will indeed become a pay service like all the others seem to be going. :(

[Ed Hansberry]

It is getting ridiculious. I need to set up a folder in IE's favorites just for pages to opt out of everytime I set up a new machine. Doubleclick, these two at Yahoo, http://opt-out.cdt.org/. It is nuts.

We should have a law that mandates anything but Opt-In is illegal.

[st63z]

Hey thanks Ed!

Let me add a few others that I found to the list (yes, I also have a recently-created Opt-Out Favorites folder): :)

http://www.networkadvertising.org/optout_nonppii.asp (not 100%?)

http://www.doubleclick.com/us/corporate/privacy/privacy/ad-cookie/default.asp

(Your CDT link directly accesses Avenua A & CoreMetrics so I won't bother re-posting their individual links)


DMA links (I had to pay 5 bucks):

http://www.the-dma.org/cgi/offmailinglistdave
http://www.the-dma.org/cgi/offtelephonedave
http://www.the-dma.org/consumers/optoutform_emps.shtml