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Yahoo To Try To Charge For POP3 Services
NetSerf2000 writes: "I just saw an article on the Register that Yahoo is giving users of it's email service until the 24th of April to make a decision about forking out $19.99 for the first year. Yahoo states that this is so it can 'improve' service quality and 'reduce" spam.' The report says that it's the mailing forwarding and POP3 services, so I'm not sure that it affects the Webmail service; if it reduces the spam coming out of Yahoo!, that'd be one less domain I have to filter into "Spam," which would be nice.
Yahoo's change is being done for purely business reasons (i.e. to increase ad viewing). It is so they can afford to keep their bandwith, not for anti-spamming/etc. Pretty simple.
They could have done something like the qmail POP before accepting SMTP (to make users authenticate before being able to relay mail for them).
UPS Sucks
I'll take ads and propaganda as long as they aren't trying to trick me. I'd rather have text ads at the bottom of my emails than those damn x10 popup's, etc. Now the funny thing is...two things I use the most (and enjoy) online are yahoo mail and slashdot. But as soon as I saw the Yahoo mail change I thought well heck I can go for that no big deal and its worth it for the services I'll be receiving overall. But I don't plan to subscribe to the slashdot system. So I think an important lesson is to be learned here. I'll chalk up the $$ for the things that actually provide me a service. If slashdot ONLY allowed access to most thing by pay service then as long as it was reasonable I'd probably go in for it. But if I can take some annoyance or ads and still get my stuff for free then that's me.
"I'd always had longer hair than other boys. I was a long-haired musician before hippies came along." Willie Nelson
Like the subject says. Mail.com is discontinuing free forwarding.
I can understand their reasons, but this one in particular galls me. I signed up with iname.net for "free forwarding for life." mail.com bought them out, and maintained the services (although not as well) until now. Suddenly they've decided not to honour contracts that they've bought out.
I don't mind the money, but those bastards aren't getting any from me for that sort of behaviour.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
What's interesting to me about this is that I have my old yahoo account forwarded. I now have my own domain so I rarely use my yahoo account anymore except for testing.
I've noticed that if I leave the yahoo account non-forwarded and only accessable through the web, that the account accumulates somewhere around 10-15 spams per day. Some of which get autmoatically put into bulk mail, some of which don't. But if I forward the account to my domain, I don't really get any spam at all. Perhaps 1-2 per week.
I've tested this over several weeks now, and it's a strange thing. Yahoo! are the *only* people who know whether or not I'm forwarding. Are they sending more spam to webmail accounts in order to encourage people to move to forwarding accounts? Why would it behave like this?
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Slashdot is in a fairly unique position as far as this goes. Okay, so there are some other geek news sites, but I along with a lot of other people will always read Slashdot. Yahoo on the other hand is one of the millions of web based e-mail services. I'm sure there will be others prepared to offer free POP3 e-mail, causing people who rely on such free services to switch away from Yahoo. I use my own domain (which I could probably get for the price of a Yahoo POP3 account) and would not switch to Yahoo as a matter of principle.
Follow me
I've been using my Yahoo email address for 3-4 years. Their spam filtering is already pretty good. They add a "X-YahooFilteredBulk" header to a large proportion of the crap. I've been auto-forwarding my Yahoo account for a while. The first thing my mail server does is bounce any message with the "X-YahooFilteredBulk" header field. When I enabled that filter I went from 20 spams a day to about 5 a week.
.co.kr and get that even lower, although I have a couple of friends going to Korea next year to teach English. I can live with the levels of spam that's currently getting through my filters though. The numbers are small enough that I don't accidentally delete important messages.
I could probably filter against
I only ever use their web interface when I'm away from home. So, I've had free email service with no advers from them for quite a while. I've been telling everybody how good it is that I have an address that never changes (I've lived in 3 countries in the last 6 years, and gone though about a dozen ISP, job and university email accounts in that time). US$20 for a year's service seems pretty reasonable to me for the amount I use the service, and the value for money I get and have had.
Do I feel that they've let me get used to their service and get settled on it, and now they're taking advantage of my position? A little, but I'm not really offended. I could start telling everybody to email me at my domain address, but then my spam would probably start building up again. Of course, having my own domain might even keep my spam problem down through the use of a different alias for every place.
A while ago I wrote a Perl program to spider through my yahoo mail account and download my email. I had some reason to do it instead of just going to pop3, but mostly because I wanted to play around with it. The code is pretty damn ugly, but mostly because it is the first spider I ever wrote, and I was too lazy to look up nice examples. The programs can be found here. Before Yahoo started charging for pop3, the ethics of this were pretty straight forward. Now I will leave this as an exercise for the reader. (I think it is ok because I am still using their web interface for email, and I am just using this because I am an information pack rat. Your millage may vary.) W
How difficult is it to set up an IMAP mail server? Currently I use fetchmail to retrieve mail from yahoo (which is my main e-mail acct), and this change bugs me! I use RoadRunner with my Slackware box.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
MyRealBox.
Their privacy policy makes it clear they won't send advertisements to you or sell your information. They also specifically state that they won't send any unsolicited email and I couldn't find any mention that signing up constitutes you accepting advertising emails from them.
HotPop.
This one is a bit dodgy. They specifically state clearly that by signing up, that you will recieve email from them, from advertisors. Signing up means, that you are soliciting these emails according to them. At least they're being honest about it.
Any more?
I personally would stick with Yahoo, since I've been using that address for so long and I think $20-$30/year isn't too bad. There are no gurantees that these other 2 services won't charge you either in future.
Please, send me all the promotional email you want, as long as each and every one of the fuckers begins with "ADV" so I can filter it. Spam doesn't bother me one bit. It's the spam that pretends to be normal email that frustrates the hell out of me.
And Yahoo's spam filter is a joke. Mailing list email that I receive ends up going into the spam filter, but actual spam from companies like Bottom Line (I never opted it) ends up in my inbox. The only reasonable conclusion I can draw is that their spam filter is lame, and that spammers probably can pay yahoo a kickbox to be excluded from the filtering.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.