Slashdot Mirror
AltaVista Gives Up On E-mail [Updated]
One krow (and a flock of others) wrote with this news: "According to this article, AltaVista is ceasing to provide e-mail (stranding a million users who use the service). So what does it say that a company the size of AltaVista calls it quits with a service like e-mail?" One thing is sure: old e-mail addresses, like old physical addresses, are a pain to reconcile with everyone who wants to send you (flowers / letters / bills). Update 0819 US EST by Roblimo: As a number of readers have pointed out, Altavista is terminating its free (ad-supported) ISP service, not its email service. If you have an Altavista email account, relax. We regret the error.
We all know what most large companies like to do with personal information these days. Sell Sell Sell.
This was happening with all the free services already. Not only do they sell your personal information, but some even force you to fill out forms, etc. They constantly display advertising.
tanstaafl. For those of you who don't read Heinlein, that means "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch". Just because you aren't paying them in cash doesn't mean you aren't paying them. They are getting money from displaying ads to you, selling your personal information, etc.
Obviously in this case, they weren't getting enough money from doing it. But if they were getting none, they wouldn't have done it in the first place.
Personally, I'd much rather pay an ISP in cash than deal with more online spam, snail-mail spam, and telemarketers. And even advertisements. I hate banners ads.
I was using altavista internet access for the last 6-7 months and I can say that their service was more reliable and faster than MSN. They had a great service with no busy signals. The ads never bothered me at all. After a week, you learn to ignore them anyway.
I am a big fan of free ISP's. First of all, you can have multiple ISP accounts without paying anything. If one of them has network problems, just use the other one.
Second of all, you don't need to give personal information and more importantly credit card info.
Third of all, they are easy to use. Install the software and you are ready to go.
It is very sad that Altavista gave up, but there are other free ISPs anyway. I don't see any point of paying $21.95 for MSN. I used MSN for one month. After one week I noticed that none of my emails are delivered. Their smtp server was erasing emails from non-msn email addresses silently, no warning at all. So you need to send emails from your msn address. I send an email to tech support complaining how they screwed up my emails and business. They replied with a standard temlate telling me how they are sensitive about spams, and that I was spamming. After some more replies and three weeks, they understood the problem and gave me a new smtp sever address to use. And I cancel my account... So you don't get always what you pay for.
Yes. I guess that you could say that Slashdot has become much like the US Patent Office then, and just passing along anything that anybody puts under it's nose, probably without reading it.
--It burns! --It's loaded with wasabi.
I moderated up to a +3 the Bruce Perens comment you are referring to. And you are right that Slashdot editors do make a lot of mistakes. And as another poster so already stated, you do have the most awesome slashdot id in the world.
On the other hand I think CmdrTaco's comments about Bruce Perens "stints" at one thing or another are valid. Let's take a look:
1] First he was involved with Debian but then he quit because it wasn't getting newbie friendly and it wouldn't adopt the rpm package manager.
2] He started Software in the Public Interest. But he quit.
3] Then he was involved with the OSI but he quit because ESR allowed O'Reilly to use the word open source at a comvention even the the rest of the OSI board voted not too.
4] Then he started LSB but quit because it wasn't moving fast enough.
5] Then he started this venture capital group but now he's quiting that too.
To me this represents a series of "stints." A fairly dang freaking awesome series of stints. But "stints" none the less.
but we don't pay. We get this for free.
We (at least some) contribute work in posting stories, commentaries and moderation. I think this gives us the right to at least protest. The editors also contribute. But the site needs both types.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Looks like the article is about free net access, not email, two rather different things.
Two years ago I bought myself a domain. Ok, sure, it's a lot more expensive than using the free stuff that AltaVista gives you, but as long as I'm willing to shell out $35 a year plus another $100 or so for a server I don't need to worry about my provider cutting out on me. If the server host does, I can always change hosts.
So, if you do need email, the solution is simple: buy yourself a domain and give yourself whatever silly email addresses you like. I personally am a big fan of SLASHDOTSPAM@mydomain.com.
--
RumorsDaily
I liked altavista back when they were just a damn good search engine, and not a cheesy portal site. If I wanted a cheesy portal site, I'd go to "Yahoo!".
At least Google has managed to handle everything tastefully so far; I definitely respect them more for it. Heck, they don't even have banner ads, unlike some other sites...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
1) How many dotcom MBA's are surprised by the fact that a vast majority of internet users are willing to pay ~$20.00 a month for Ad-Free browsing/email?
.com appendage absolved of that nasty little obligation.
2) A what? A revenue model? What the heck is that? Stockholders? You mean we have to earn money and be profitable? I thought the
So get your own domain name. Domains are portable, although in practice moving a domain from one ISP to another takes several days.
I use Yahoo mail in my example but I think this proves my point.
Each individual email recipient on earth should have their own domain name.
That way, if your provider goes down - whether it's a web-based service like Yahoo or AltaVista, or an ISP service, or if you just move geographically and don't want to keep paying for connectivity you don't use anymore, it just takes a couple days for changes to your DNS to take effect and your back up.
I got my own domain name after my ISP was down for a week. And they've been bought out so many times it's amazing they still serve the old domain anymore.
The big pain for me now is going to be moving all the web pages that are hosted at my old ISP. Some of them are important ones that people have linked to from other sites. If I'd owned my own domain in the first place, there'd be no problem. Instead I'll put placeholders will META REFRESH tags in them to point at all the pages on the new sites and keep paying their bill another year or so.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
First off, 66666 is a damned good slashdot id.
But to the real point, Slashdot gets a bad rap in the comment sections a lot of the time. I know because I run a webpage that's got a similarly vocal clientel from time to time. You've got to understand that even though these guys may be getting paid to run this website by somebody out there in the real world, it is not by any of us. Sure, if we were paying for it we'd have the right to yell and scream, but we don't pay. We get this for free.
Even with the grammar and spelling errors, even with the repeat stories, even with the poorly checked links, this website is much more than I'm paying for it.
As much as it's annoying to see the same story twice, it's not a big deal. The same thing goes for a story that doesn't quite boil down the essence of the link perfectly. Sure, ok, they made a mistake here. So point it out on the talkback zone here, but there's no reason to attack the owners of the site personally. If it's incorrect, tell us what's right, don't act as if you're so high and mighty.
It's a mistake, treat it as such.
Slashdot fans... be patient and say thank you CmdrTaco and Hemos once in a while. It's not often on the web that you find something anywhere near as wonderful and useful as Slashdot, and when you do you should appreciate it. Attempting to tear it down piece by piece just shows how little respect you have for this service.
Thank you Slashdot folks, I appreciate the hard work you do and thank you for your effort.
--
RumorsDaily
First, I'll comment on the editorial question "what does this mean"..
:)
.. dont get it.
Them ending free dialup means that they obviously learned that it wasnt worth it. The average dialup costs around $7-9 per month to service and maintain (I worked at a national isp, thats the numbers we had).
With those numbers, with a million users, they were spending $7 million roughly PER MONTH. Thats a nice fat national television ad run. Its an easy choice to stop services like that when budgets are tighter.
Now, some bitching.
The first line on the page of the article, IN BOLD was:
"update AltaVista is terminating its free Internet access service, making it the latest company to exit the market."
NOT email.
In the last two weeks, we have seen over eight stories that were old submissions with NO changes, three that were updates of old submissions that didnt mention the original (sony walking robot), and plenty of spell-checking problems, and crap like this.
Not to mention the Bruce Perens article that practically insults him. Now, I dont get around much, but in my limited dealings with the OS/FS/Linux community, he has been wonderful, open, and very accomodating.
What the hell is up guys? Now that you got paid do you just not give a damn?
Now, dont get me wrong, I am not saying "Its not like the old days", cause I wasnt on then.
However, in the last year, I can definitely say that they dont do nearly as much editorial checking.
Hell, Bruce submitted his story HIMSELF, TWICE, and it was rejected, but then it was submitted with that rude editorial attached.
I just
Wake up guys, RUN YOUR SITE!
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
What do you expect them to do? The company that was providing the free net access is going out of business. It's not like this is the first free net access company to bite the bullet recently.