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.

Comments

Using forwarding on Yahoo! == less spam

[mjh]

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?

Already good at filtering spam

[Malc]

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.

I could probably filter against .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 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.