Slashdot Mirror
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.
Haha, I'd sooner pay for a slashdot subscription.
If you're using the forwarding or POP3, then you're not viewing the web-page adverts that are Yahoo's bread & butter.
So you'd be paying not to see adverts. What a zany idea.
rOD.
Rod Begbie done this, and he's not
I am an all-day user of pop forwarding for my Yahoo account. To be quite honest - I get 0 spam to it as well. I only use it for personal communications and never for buying goods at stores - I let hotmail get all my spam. Anyway, with the belts getting tightened the world over I really don't mind ponying up $19 for a year's worth of spam-free email. I don't think that's alot to ask. I'll be signing up today.
Have a Happy.
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
Frankly, I really won't. I used to use Yahoo's POP3 service on a regular basis for an email account used only for registering with Web sites. Then somehow the account got on a spam list -- and the name isn't anything that would be easily guessed, though it does mean something to me. It's unusable because of the huge amounts of spam that flow into it.
... doesn't get spam. And because it's from a friend, it's free and if anything does go wrong, I can personally send complaints to the server administrator.
I stopped using the POP3 service months ago and got a new mailbox from a friend who runs his own Web and IRC system. The domain name of the new account means much more to me than Yahoo's, isn't labeled "freemail" for all those sites that won't take those, and best of all
Plus, he's a really nice guy. Yahoo's just a faceless megacorp.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Yahoo! is only planning on charging for their Yahoo! Delivers service. This is the service that permits you to access their POP3 and SMTP servers, or forward your yahoo.com mail to another address. Previously, the expense was that you had to sign up for opt-in spam through Yahoo!, but apparently, that wasn't working for them.
Yahoo!'s web mail will still be free, and if you really need the POP3/SMTP/forwarding service, $20 a year really isn't that bad.
Without giving out my Hotmail address to anyone, I received spam. Now I've given up on trying to block spam going into the account and just let it happen. I use that address to sign up to services on the web with, as I no longer care about it. My Yahoo account has a lot of spam too, although I got it intending to use it as my "signing up to new online services" address, so I can understand it having spam. I've heard rumours (and going by the privacy agreements it's prefectly possible) that web-based mail companies sell your e-mail address to mailing list companies. Owning a web-based email address is effectively opting in for spam. How can companies do that, and still announce publicly that they are working hard to try and reduce spam?
Follow me
A large percentage of the spam I receive has a forged Yahoo address in the From:, but the headers show that it actually comes from somewhere else - about half the time via an open relay somewhere in asia.
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
Most of what I recieve has a Yahoo address in the "from" header, but has been routed through some middle eastern spam relay. You should always check to see what server the e-mail was sent through when complaining to someone about it. I find this is quite reliable in stopping the flow of spam (I've not has spam at my home account this year yet). If the server has no address to complain to, contact their upstream provider.
Follow me
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
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.
I received the following mail:
o me-id
To: MYMAILADDRESS
Subject: Important Yahoo! Mail Service Announcement
From: Yahoo! Mail
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 02:00:26 PST
Hello,
Important service announcement regarding your POP3 or Mail Forwarding service. Please read on.
Effective April 24, 2002, Yahoo! Mail will no longer provide free POP3 Access or Auto Mail Forwarding to Yahoo! Delivers subscribers.
If you would like to continue using Mail Forwarding or POP3 Access, please subscribe to our improved package that allows you to:
- Use Outlook, Eudora, or another POP3 client to access and manage your Yahoo! Mail.
- Automatically forward your Yahoo! Mail to another email account -- even another Yahoo! address!
- Send larger attachments, now up to 5MB instead of the free 1.5MB limit.
- Send email without the Yahoo! promotional text at the bottom.*
Subscribe before April 24th and get the first year of service for just $19.99. That's 33% off the regular service fee of $29.99. Visit the following link to subscribe:
http://ordering.yahoo.com/or/ypm/...s
Remember, if you do not subscribe by April 24, 2002, you will no longer be able to access your Yahoo! Mail messages by POP or at another email address.
Sincerely,
The Yahoo! Mail Team
For further information, please read our frequently asked questions. Please note that your Yahoo! Delivers settings will not be affected.
*Applies only to email sent through the Yahoo! SMTP servers.
I had deleted it as spam. What does THAT tell you about Yahoo?
Yahoo wants more revenue from this service. They run a quality email service. The $19.95 gets you a bigger mailbox, allows larger attachemnts, and really isn't expensive, compared to other communication services (e.g. telephone service, which I don't even use as much as email, yet pay a hell of a lot more for). I'm happy to pay them so little for what I gain from it.
Yahoo states that this is so it can 'improve' service quality
Hahaha, wotta joke. Everyone knows that charging money couldn't possibly 'improve' service quality! This is the Internet, running mail servers is free!
Oh, wait, that was last year.
-- Sigs are for losers
In short, they stick Yahoo with the bounces, and with many of the knee-jerk reactions to the spam.
I get maybe 40 spams/day. Many of these do have From: addresses from yahoo.com. And less than 1% of those actually came from yahoo.com -- the rest were forged. And the (less than) 1% that did come from Yahoo were people mucking around with the mailing lists, trying to use them for spam.
I've had a yahoo.com e-mail address for about three years now, and until recently it was my main e-mail address. At home I _always_ used a POP client to read my e-mail, and only used the Web gateway if I were on someone else's computer.
The account's become almost useless lately, because I've been getting so much spam (Yahoo's filters only hold back a fraction of it), so I'm almost glad that Yahoo is giving me an excuse to close the account altogether. Softhome.net is much better.
hyacinthus.
Novell runs www.myrealbox.com as a demonstration of their e-mail products.
It's free and you get
Pop3, IMAP, SMTP
10 Megs of space
webmail
all free, no ads
I've been using the service for years and I don't ever remember it being down.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
I have, and will continue to run my own IMAP mail server off my cable modem. It works well, it's blazing fast at home, I have complete archives (over 300MB of mail), no quota, and the mail comes directly to me.
Charging for email is inevitable. These services require huge hardware infrastructures that have, to this point, been funded by the stock market. Going forward, you can expect the major services to charge...as soon as the little guys are out of the market (which is happening rapidly).
I signed up for a spamcop email account a couple of weeks ago. I had been using Yahoo! but the amount of spam I had been getting increased dramatically over the past few months and their interface makes it hard to report spam.
Spamcop is $30 a year, and I've been happy with it. Out of about 80 spams it let 3 or 4 slip into my inbox, and hasn't incorrectly detained any of them. The interface is pretty nice, but not perfectly smooth. I would recommend it to anyone who understands how email works.
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.
It adds a header (something like X-Yahoo-Bulk) for the ones that are in the bulk folder. Just filter on that.
Fastmail is a service that includes IMAP and Webmail in their free service. They also are about to drop POP3 from the free service. But, there's an option for a 1 time $10 fee for full access to SMTP.
:)
The best thing about it is, they're using Linux.
How does the cost/benefit work here? I would think that it'd be cheaper for them to handle a POP3 connection from me once every day or so than for them to store 10 megs of my crap and process 5-10 web accesses a day, but hey, I could wrong. But what if everyone does that?
In the end, this is like GeoCities charging for FTP uploading, now to upload for free, you have to put up with their crappy File Manager uploader mutation. Why is it that they're charging for services that should be cheaper for them to provide? Convenience.
-sk
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
The only requirement is that one use a Mac (or Mac-claiming browser) to set up the account; it's at Mac.com. That said aside from certain administrative functions it works perfectly well from the Wintel & *nix sides too. Mail, web serving, WebDAV all are platform independent, indeed MS Windows 2K & XP include WebDAV clients that work perfectly with Apple's iDisk service.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
The old agreement for getting yahoo through POP3 involved marking a checkbox where you would agree to be put on more advertiser's lists so that Yahoo could get more revenue from spammers. What I think will really happen now is that you'll pay for them to "remove the spam"... yeah right! and it'll be the same as before with you $20 poorer...haha...
I can't say too much though. I use USA.Net and they charged $30/year last year. Now they wanna charge for $45/year or $65/2yrs (members price) for e-mail. Thing is I want to have one non-isp dependent e-mail address so that people can always get ahold of me on e-mail. I also don't wanna host my own e-mail server (reliability), and I don't want to succumb to the borg. I gotta get my own domain!
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
If I remember correctly, the Internet was originally created (in the public manner) for the free exchange of information
No, you do not remember correctly, or you are confusing free as in beer with free as in speech.
The internet was created to facilitate communication, but has never, ever been intended to be free of cost to its users, who were initially academics at universities or research organizations. These universities bore the cost of development and paid for their members to use the internet, just as I had "free" use of the internet as a college student.
Since coming out of college, I have been responsible for paying for my own access to the internet.
Aside from the issue of access, there is the issue of content, eg news sites. In the early days of the WWW, about the only web sites were at universities, and the only published documents were research papers. No ads, but these sites were fully paid for by universities and research grants.
Now there are loads of companies out there who are trying to make money on the internet. Their sites would not exist if there weren't somebody paying to support them, either through subscription fees or advertising.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
Yahoo! are you listening: Here is what I want from a for-pay email provider
As myself and other people start using more and more wireless networks (specifically public wireless networks), I have realized that there is no email provider that offers the proper services:
- IMAP via TLS & SSL
- SMTP via TLS & SSL with Auth - Allowing you to send mail from any return address after you have already authenticated
- POP via SSL
- WebMail via Full SSL (not just the login)
- Allow you to forward your other email accounts to it
- Allow you to send from a return email address of your other account (i.e. yourname@yourcompanyemail.com).
- Fetchmail functions for automatic downloading of your other email accounts.
- A reasonable amount of disk storage
- The option to download your email for offline archiving
If other email providers are listening or someone wants a quick business idea, start providing secure email services, and no Hushmail doesn't count because the don't offer POP, IMAP or SMTP. And no I don't want to host this email on my home server like I already do. It needs to something that the mass populous can be referred to.Sidenote to the Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink and other top email providers. Please start requiring secure login protocols (no cleartext passwords). The average user is never going to click on that extra link for an SSL login page.
..that if they are going this route they had better stop sending me spam. I allowed them to send me spam ONLY because it was a pre-requisite for POPing my account.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
The point is they don't care if you leave, because most likely enough people will pay up to more than make up for the minimal lost ad revenue from losing a few users.
Any e-mail sent through Yahoo's SMTP gateway gets a little ad slapped onto the bottom of the message. The ad is usually for a Yahoo service, but it's an ad anyway you slice it.
::Colz Grigor
Even if you're using POP3, someone still gets to view an ad.
Do you think this will change once I fork over $19.99 a month? Likely story.
I just wish my email programs allowed me to filter off of strings in the full header
:D
Mozilla Messenger (and I assume Netscape Messenger) allows you to specify a custom header field to filter on. So you can filter on anything in the headers.
Fantastic. You just spammed a spam story with an anti-spam policy. I'm breathless.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
http://www.emailaddresses.com/email_pop.htm
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Fuck them. They already allow spam past their spam filters when it suits them (probably for kickbacks) - their service is slow, and unreliable. Often, some emails arrive without the content that the sender typed, and some emails just hang out on some server somewhere for weeks before the receiver gets them.
I've been a Yahoo customer for 5 years, and if they start charging for their service, fuck them, I'm gone. I'll start using the accounts pacbell gives me with my DSL service.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
eiomail looks interesting...
r 0n@you.eiomail.com
However, what's to stop a spammer from knowing that eiomail is target recoverable and just start sending:
spam1@you.eiomail.com
spam2@you.eiomail.com
p
Is the only protection from this that eiomail is not that popular yet? Also, I thought that sometimes servers just try to brute force a mail server to find valid email addresses for common names. wouldn't all of those get delivered?
just wondering.
-pos
The truth is more important than the facts.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
..for a slashdot address?
username@slashdot.org would be nice,
or
user usernumber@slashdot.org.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yahoo mail is excellent. And a Yahoo ID (which is the same thing) gives me excellent access to teh features that Yahoo provides - Yahoo is one of the most useful sites on the net.
Its worth 2 bucks a month. I drop more on donuts at Shipleys every week.
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
If you read the article...
If you were using POP services...
Then you would know that this doesn't affect you. All of my e-mail on Yahoo has been delivered to me by POP in folders or not.
They are NOT charging for web mail users. If you use their folders you are a web mail user.
Micrsoft Outlook 2000 will allow you to specify rules based on "any" header field. You cannot specify a specific header field other than from:, to:, sub:, etc. but you can filter based on the entire header.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
I'm on yahoo.co.uk and I haven't been told about this either.
Also,
Yahoo email is plagued with SPAM.
it's not worth 19.99/yr. because of the SPAM.
We're moving toward a situation of large private monopolies providing our hitherto "free" POP-abble email. Of course as private companies they are able to change their terms of service. And, as they no longer have to make themselves as attractive due to reduced competition we have to accept that we'll be paying for Spam in the near future.
All this is so that speculative investors can make a profit on the service that we all need.
Here's a crazy idea: divert some of our taxes from military expenditure, slap some more taxes on speculative investment, and divert that revenue into providing a free, POP3 accesible , low memory account for every citizen.
Don't like that idea? Don't like government providing public goods? Want to let the "Market" sort things out with its sweaty invisible hand?
Then don't complain about Yahoo charging, that's exactly what's happening.
um - BULLSHIT.
I have a mac.com account, along with about a dozen other services, and mac.com is the LEAST reliable among them (yahoo, pacbell, hotmail, mail.com, etc). I'd say a full 50% of the time I can't even contact the mac.com server, and another 45% of the time, I can contact it, but it takes well over a minute. Mac.com has been nothing but a huge waste of time for me.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Peggy,
.mil, .gov, and .edu. It was the Military, the Government, and the Educational institutions paying for it. It was basically a closed system at the time. The consumers were also the suppliers and they were also the source of support. Now the Internet has far more consumers who provide nothing back, and people are trying to make money off of it.
.gov or .edu yourself. There wasn't a Web then, and there wasn't much "consumer" content at that time either. The Internet of today has almost nothing in common with the Internet of 1993 other than the basic principles that make it run. You claim that the telcos "piggybacked" their backbones on a 2 decade old system. That's insane. Please tell me exactly when the US gov started building the international ATM backbones that make up a majority of the Internet today.
When the Internet, or arpanet or darpanet, or whatever you want to call it was just
If you (as an idividual) had access to the Internet in 1993 you were probably at a
The Internet was never free (as in beer) and never will be.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
Last year, I signed up for their Personal Address service, where for $35/year, you get a domain that they host for you. Basically, it's an alias that points back to your Yahoo address. The thing is, you can have up to five addresses in your domain for that price. Not bad for mail hosting. Naturally, I got my mail using POP3. Now they want to pull this shit, and only a month after I renewed my subscription. I feel like I just got ripped off.
I'm not going to cough up $19.95/year for this. I'll take my domain and transfer it to someplace like Stargate. At least they give me one POP3 address with domain registration. Are there any other registrars who will register a domain for a good price and throw in more than one POP3 mailbox with it that I ought to be looking at?
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
Sounds a bit like Dilbert when the boss decided he had to go around with a collar and leash: "It's not that bad..."
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Yahoo has done well by me. The mail service has been really good about always being there, *never* losing a mail, service interruptions very rare, and as I recall, being due to DoS attacks more often than not.
Even though I don't need the account any more as an 'on the road' kind of thing, since I got to the state of cluefulness to be able to deal with mail without the help of an ISP, I just don't mind making a small investment to maintain the service. In my opinion, Yahoo is one of the less evil companies around and so, here's my nickel.
Another factor in this is... I don't mind sending mail with Yahoo branding, it's not nearly as embarrasing as say, showing up in somebody's mailbox wearing Hotmail noseglasses.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Well all I can say is I've rarely had problems. Last weekend there was an email outtage but that was the first I've ever noticed. As for the rest of it I've not heard of another free & advertising free host with the space, speed & services of mac.com. Your other examples all add taglines, require web interfaces, inserts ads, etc.
Heck check out Internet Help Desk video (QT & WMP) and tell me any other free service would offer this unlimited bandwidth?
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
i've been using yahoo mail for 5+ years...
this is the first I ahve heard about this.
the funny thing is that I use yahoo only for the following services:
mail.yahoo.com
yp.yahoo.com
maps.yahoo.com
and absolutely nothing else. cant remember the last time I actually did a search on yahoo.
Now that people have come to rely on Yahoo mail, and the ability to download it into their POP client, Yahoo has them hooked. So they're gonna charge for this! Previously, the only hook to get you to upgrade to the "pay" account was teh extra storage, which you didn't need if you downloaded your messages now and then.
Not that $20/year isn't a good deal- I've been using Yahoo mail because I can read webmail while travelling, then download it all when I get a chance. Plus, Yahoo is way more reliable than most ISPs' mail service- certainly moreso than Pacbell or Adelphia, which are so bad you can't rely on them at all- you really need something else.
As an avid pobox user, I can say their service has been great. They are a pure forwarding service, with no adds / hassles, and a filter like most people would setup on their own domain. They also have interesting but useless stats / graphs on volume of mail and volume of spam over time.
Having used many forwarding services over the past four years (friendly mail, mail.com, earthling.net, deathsdoor.com, yahoo, london.com, etc), I can confidently say that pobox's ping times, response times, and overall professionalism have been the best.
Good work, and support the indies.
The ______ Agenda
There are a whole bunch of webmail implementations on Freshmeat; do any of them fail to suck?
My friends who use Yahoo all also have other ISPs, including web pages, and only use Yahoo so that they can check their mail from anywhere. (They then download their Yahoo mail into a "real" mail reader via the formerly-free POP3 service, in order to archive it at home.)
It seems to me that if these folks were to install a webmail CGI on their own web pages for their private use only, they wouldn't need to use Yahoo at all to get location-independence. That's something most people would be able to do without needing root access on the HTTP server machine, assuming the ISP allows the running of CGIs at all. But there are so many packages, it's hard to guess whether any of them work, or whether any are of similar levels of usability to Yahoo's CGIs.
Any opinions?
Failing that, are there any decent "screen scrapers" that can log in to Yahoo's CGI interface and extract the HTML presentation of the messages into a Eudora/Netscape-compatible "mbox" folder? That would be a fine substitute for their POP3 interface.
Then parse and forward?
How about POP3-proxy their web mail?
Darn. I used to tell people to mail me at yahoo so I can receive mails on my Blackberrry. Now that I cannot forward I have to find another way...
Step 2: Redirect traffic from your family domain to the dynamic one.
Step 3: Install Linux on a nice 486 with ~32 MB RAM and at least a 1 GB HD
Step 4: Install apache , sendmail, perl, and maybe webmin if you are completely unfamiliar with Linux.
Step 5: If you want a web front end for your email system, try out NeoMail
Step 6: That's about it, you'll have to mess with the configration files before it runs, but it's worth it. The fact that all your email is automagically downloaded to your local machine is just an added bonus.
Well, on the other hand the price is reasonable, and the did give ample notice...
sic transit gloria mundi
I've seen postmaster@ bounce before. I guess the domain probably doesn't exist any more (being hopeful) since I reported them to someone a bit higher up. I know there's *always* an address to complain to, but how many spam server admins read their root e-mail? The address existing isn't quite as good as the e-mail being read.
Follow me
So...
$20/month * 12 months/year = $240/year
$15/month * 12 months/year + $40/year = $220/year
I'm sure Salon would be more than happy to cut you a pricing deal that makes you pay an extra $20/year.
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Floccinaucinihilipilification - the action or habit of judging something to be worthless