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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.
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
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.