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Yahoo Knows Best, Resets Users' Marketing Prefs
Go to your Account Information screen (for each and every ID you have) and about mid screen you will see "Edit Your Marketing Preferences" link. Click on it and set them back to the way you want them, otherwise get ready for *LOTS* of advertising spam type emails from Yahoo's advertisers. Note also at the bottom, that you will be marked YES for 'By US Mail' and 'By Phone' as well."
In additional Yahoo News, smagruder writes: "Starting today, I noticed that Yahoo! stopped forwarding my mail and when I go to setup/change the POP Access/Forwarding settings, they display a page for me to give them money to get my mail forwarding back. The issue: In their recent widely distributed press release, Yahoo! said that this all would start on April 24, NOT March 28!"
Update: 03/29 20:24 GMT by J : Yes, of course Yahoo is a TrustE customer. For a small fee, TrustE certifies: "You can edit your Yahoo! Account Information, including your marketing preferences, at any time." Isn't that great? I can edit my marketing preferences that I had no reason to know existed! Thanks, TrustE!
Update: 04/07 11:54 GMT by J : Nine days later, Yahoo notified me that these preferences existed:
From: Yahoo! <yahoo_privacy@reply.yahoo.com>
To: [me]
Subject: Message from Yahoo! about changes to our Privacy Policy and your Marketing Preferences[...]
In order to keep you up to date about our many new products
and services and how they might be of use to you, we have
created a new Marketing Preferences pagehttp://subscribe.yahoo.com/showaccount
within the Account Information area. It is designed to make
it easier for you to manage the marketing communications
you receive from Yahoo! and ensure you get the latest
relevant information to meet your needs. We have reset your
marketing preferences and, unless you decide to change
these preferences, you may begin receiving marketing messages
from Yahoo! about ways to enhance your Yahoo! experience,
including special offers and new features. Your new marketing
preferences will not take effect until 60 days after the date
of this mailing so you have plenty of time to decide what you
want to receive and what you don't. To change your
preferences, go to the Marketing Preferences page.
Maybe all 12 are not very computer-literate and are having trouble reconfiguring their Yahoo! mail preferences. Who knows, you might even get some tail out of it! ;-)
is there a story somewhere so us non-Yahoo'ers can verify the change? perhaps an email from Yahoo to their users, like eBay did some years ago?
Anyone care to comment on the US legality of signing people up to snail mail, telemarketing lists after they've explicitly opted out? Seems very dubious to me.
Did yahoo send out an email telling everyone this had occured? Or is this a marketing ploy of some sort?
Inquiring geeks wanna know.....
Sent from your iPad.
The bright side of this is they also reset my info so that I would get all these offers sent to my Yahoo email account. All I use Yahoo for is Fantasy Baseball so they can spam that email account to their hearts' content.
I think they implemented the restriction on POP3 access a week or so ago. I emailed their support people and got a canned response. I replied to that, as directed, for more assistance. I got the same canned reply. Then I saw that they were going to start charging.
I use this as my "junk" account, anyway, so it doesn't bother me too much. But it's annoying that they can (and will) change my preferences for me. What else are they changing (or monitoring) without my consent?
That's why I run my own email server. Broadband is very usual today, and all you need is that old 386 dusting in the closet.
*sigh*
When will companies learn, that forcing advertising/spam onto customers does not help you get more customers. All it does is leave a bad taste in the ones they DO have, and gets the company known by word of mouth as one to avoid.. Similiar to how a bad game gets mentioned in usenet, and everyone stays away from it.
Just tested it.
IANAL, but I wonder if there is an opportunity for a Class Action case here? Does Yahoo! have the right to do this?
I must say, Yahoo! seems to have gone way downhill in the past year or two. I just don't even go there anymore.
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
Did yahoo send out an email telling everyone this had occured?
You got an email saying that their privacy policy had been changed and to click a link to go review your personal settings. I just happened to notice the marketing ones. So they can plausibly argue (in court) if they have to that they did tell users to go review the settings.
Or is this a marketing ploy of some sort?
Well of course it is.
Nope, no sig
If yahoo is offering all of it's features as a
free and publically accessable system, don't they
have the right to do whatever they want with
the default settings? Granted they due operate
on the sole basis of being used, but I wouldn't
get up in arms if something that I used for
free just up and changed one day in some way
that I didn't agree with. If it really has
such a huge negative reaction from enough people
then yahoo make other changes. However somehow
i doubt that the hundreds of thousands of yahoo
users are all in that slashdot mindset.
there are alot of droids out there.
I found that my POP access was disabled after resetting the marketing preferences.
To reenable it, you need to go back and turn the Yahoo Delivers! option back on. POP Access/Forwarding require you to agree to this. Once that is done, you should be able to go back into your mail settings and check your settings.
Once I did this, it gave the options for POP/Forwarding access.
-> Capt Cosmic <-
These marketing data, as set by the user, could have been a very valuable commodity to sell to other companies. Those companies would have a very good idea of what to market to these users as a result. This makes this kind of information quite valuable. However, in resetting all of the user's preferences to be interested in everything, and given that most users will probably not give a rat's ass and change it, then these data become worthless to 3rd parties because it does not provide them with any new information. So effectively, Yahoo killed off an asset that could have been worth the money to rent and/or sell to others.
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
...Yahoo announced that it will change its marketing slogan from "Do you, uh, Yahoo?" to "You WILL Yahoo."
I've been racked with guilt for using all of those high quality Yahoo products without clicking on their ads and opting out of their high quality selected advertising promotions. Seth, oh Seth, How can permission marketing survive when we all opt out.
/. I shall click up an ad. Now, I have abused an dedicated /. advertiser. Calamities pile on injustices.
Don't blame Yahoo, blame me, blame me. I am the one who abused Yahoo's benevolence of bandwidth for my own selfish ends.
Alas, sigh.
But here I am, abusing
Alas, sigh.
I'm absolutely disgusted with Yahoo's behavior here...
It's one thing to activate "Yes" on all those email spam options, but I provided Yahoo with my address and phone number when I made a credit card purchase through Yahoo Travel. I'm pretty sure I was told that these would be kept confidential and were mainly for the purpose of credit card verification. At any rate, I trusted them with these details.
But it turns out they put "Yes" on my phone number and physical mailing address, as well.
I'm really disgusted with Yahoo on this. They've gone too far.
I prefs for marketing have stayed the same. In addition to having a spam/product registration e-mail account at yahoo, I also belong to some clubs and groups. When I looked at my prefs, they had not changed.
I have noticed that the mail-forwarding has ended. All of my pr0n stays on yahoo.
All I know is that whoever lives at 123 Fake St. in my town is going to be very offended at the manner in which mail is addressed to them.
I've got got a couple of .ca yahoo! accounts and they don't seem to be affected. (Looks like there aren't even any offers to sign up for.) This definitely affects regular (US) accounts, though.
Okay, besides generally pissing people off, wouldn't this seriously increase their own space usage? I mean if now every account is getting spammed by every 'marketing partner'.... Hrm, or do they do something smart and have a single copy and only show it to those who have a preference for that particular marketer? Okay, now I don't know. :) Oh well it's still stupid.
Can we build a new internet and start over? This one is starting to smell funny...
I've been trying to get my parents online for a couple of years now. Not an easy task when I live thousands of miles away and can't provide much in the way of instruction. So far its been a nightmare. Machines pre-installed with the full trojan-horse marketing one expects from a windows machine. Their doors to the web, AOL, MSN... all of it making their experience feel like getting 500 new cable channels that are all just different versions of the Home Shopping Channel. Email with a GUI that looks like Mickey Mouse has hacked your pop mail account. Lots of shiny clunky flashy advertising for people that really don't buy shit anyway...
The desperation with which corporations and their advertising machines come after us makes me very uneasy about the stability and future of our economy. The pyramid scheme can't hold... I can't afford/don't need any more crap.
"The U.S. Constitution - not perfect, but its better than what we have now"
This is why communties like this are important. I would have had no clue this was happening. Thanks. I was able to make the changes. I also changed all my contact information in my yahoo account to let them know how I felt about them!
Bastards.
I can't say that I'm surprised about it. Yahoo's been buying up all of these not-really-for-profit services for a couple of years now, and now they're in the scrambling-to-make-them-pay-for-themselves part of things. Of course, none of the services they provide are actually worth any *money* to speak of... I keep wondering how long they've got.
Unfortunately, it does work for a lot of sleazy companies. Some business models do not rely on having a good image for the company. It's just a numbers game. Even if they only get a tiny number of sales for every batch of emails, it will still make them money because it is so cheap to send out the solicitations. Spammers will keep spamming until enough people smarten up and stop making it profitable for them.
Life is but a mist upon the horizon.
i always wonder if, when an article is submitted by an AC, the person works for the company that is behaving badly. if so, kudos to them for doing what's right.
go get it
I went to this url:
And sure enough everything was set to "yes".
But what I want to know is, why on earth would you give Yahoo! your real address and telephone number?? My account is all lies.
Then again, I only use Yahoo to track my portfolio.. I hardly use any of the services.
u r teh g4y
Can this "story" be confirmed?
/. prefs to not filter AC comments, but any schmoe AC can post something to the front page?
Why is it that I can set my
I see no facts to back this up at all. I have a Yahoo ID, and have received nothing indicating a change in their policies regarding this.
Unless someone can corroborate this with some documented facts, I won't believe it.
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
I like bashing marketing as much as the next guy, but maybe this was just a technical mistake.
Before everyone goes and gets there panties in a not, maybe we could try to get some real information here and not just assume its "da man" trying to screw us over again.
Anyone know of a good free email service, I've
had a Yahoo account for years, but this is the
last straw.
Yahoo Employee 2: Oops ... my bad ...
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
I went in and signed up for a new account (spambot12321), and I was never presented with a choice for these items. They asked if I'd like other things ("Send me special offers from selected Yahoo! partners through Yahoo! Delivers."), but the items listed in http://subscribe.yahoo.com/showaccount never showed up.
So I don't know about other people who say they've already set these to "no," but at least for new accounts you're signed up for all of it whether you want to be or not. Bastards.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
NOTICE: Since you've posted to /. we have kindly modified your preferences
[Y] Spam
[Y] Pr0n
[Y] support HP merger
[Y] something..something...cowboyneal
Have a nice day
On the Gray line that says "Hello <Yahoo-ID>" there is a link Edit Email Subscriptions.
All of thoses were not even set when I view the page the first time...
I'm posting this anonymously so as not to get any karma out of asking people to mod this up.
I have several friends with their own servers on fairly fast connections. With yahoo gutting its services, I'm curious if there's any open source program out there that provides all the features yahoo does/did: namely, web/pop3 email combined with easy to use web-based groups.
It would be nice to be able to set up some sort of private email/groups server for my friends.
Thanks,
Lendrick
Because they require you to use other email addresses as well to access their own. Subscribing people to other massive unsolicited advertising without their consent is illegal in a few states now I think. This could be a big break for some people to make a TON of money from this screw-up.
Your account will remain in their database for 90 days, then poof gone, but the account is deactivated. For what that's worth. Peace of mind?
delete your account
The Daily Build
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=30264&cid=3249 479
They clearly state what they're offering in return for what they're taking. They provide you with a certain type of email with certain types of marketing, while you provide them information and bet battered with annoying blinking ads.
They're plain and simply not free to change this or to use information you provided for other purposes.
hawk
Putting fake information in is not a good idea. According to the agreement (which you agreed to by signing up) they can revoke your account for false information...of course, they'd have to find out but they've got their fingers in many pies...
internet like monkeys'
In related news, we've signed you all up for a /. newsletter! (I am so just kidding.)
We SO just have to wait and see...
CNET had an article on this yesterday. In brief, Yahoo! split their Marketing Preferences into a bunch of categories, and defaulted the new categories to opted-in. They are mailing out notices (a process that will take a few weeks) telling people about the new preferences. They then have 60 days to opt-out.
I didn't even know they had my phone number. I must have been careless back in the day. Well, they don't anymore, unless they kept a backup. They also no longer have my mailing address. I've generally been happy with the way they've handled things like this, but they seriously screwed up this time. If I hadn't seen this article, I wouldn't have found out until I started getting junk mail from yahoo in my snailmailbox. They didn't give me any notification.
I used to use Yahoo because they were free and I trusted them more than Microsoft (remember the "we own your e-mails" thing?) and I was sure they'd be around a while. Now I've got another free service, though I'm paying ten grand a year to be here so I can use it.
It would be nice if something were free, good, and around forever. It would also be nice if I could fly like in those XP ads, or if chocolate milk would rain from the sky.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Other Delivery Indicate other ways you want to receive the special offers and marketing communications you have selected.
via U.S. mail [X] Yes Novia phone [X] Yes No
I unfortunately have a "yahoo id".... not by choice, but i subscribed to some mailing lists that got moved to onelists some time ago. no big deal, i didn't have to change anything in the way i received email. then they got gobbled up by e-groups and the mailing lists i was on all received email telling us about it and to go to e-groups' web site to change preferences. what the hell? this is an EMAIL LIST! i subscribed by email, receive email and you want me to now manage that through some crappy web interface? grumble grumble....
so then egroups gets bought up by yahoo and the same thing happens. i'm used to it by now, and at least i have a half-way decent web browser by this point in case i ever have to change anything.
then finally the day comes when i have to change the email address mail is sent to. i send mail to the lists subscribe/unsubscribe address, hoping to get the usual "help" email, but instead i find i can only change my options through the web site - no other options. ok, i fire up the web browser, trundle on over there and... i'm not allowed to manage my account, where now 3 mailing lists have been centralized, mailing lists i have been subscribed to for years, without signing up for some "yahoo id" and giving out all kinds of personal information! great, i get a free email address out of it - like i need another.
on the bright side, it looks like i caught it in time, as the email address i have those mailing lists sent to didn't receive anything out of the ordinary. i don't know about the yahoo email address, i've never looked at it and have no intention of doing so.
-Smoke.
Well, if they want to spam snail mail addresses and phones, give them some addresses to spam to!
Enter these in your home/work preferences, and only turn off the email spams:
Yahoo! Canada
106 Front Street East
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 1E1
Phone: 416.341.8605
Fax: 416.341.8800
------------------
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, California 94089
Tel. (408) 349-3300
Fax. (408) 349-3301
Tel. 408-349-2000
I'm sure yahoo would LOVE to hear from their advertisers any day!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Yahoo gets more and more obnoxious. I dropped "Yahoo Store" years ago, when they started wanting a cut of my sales in addition to a monthly fee.
At least Yahoo! lets you delete an account you don't want anymore . That's a rarity amongst online services. If your account isn't useful to you anymore - this is the best way to make sure they don't reset the preferences when you're not looking ever again.
http://edit.yahoo.com/config/delete_user (must be logged in)
I simply went in and added their mailing address and phone number as my primary contact. Now, their marketing department will be sending their own contact info to their partners.. Maybe if we all did this, they'll get flooded with all their own goddamned SPAM!
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
In New York State you can register you phone number(s) on a Do Not Call list. Any telemarketer (with exceptions for politics and those with whom you have a "prior business relationship") who calls a number registered with the state is liable for fines up to $2000. So Yahoo might be able to get away with calling you, but not some other business you have no relationship with who they've given your number to.
___
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
So, I just went pay the $19.99 to continue to use the POP services at Yahoo. It is worth it to me for that amount. I find out though that I *must* create a Yahoo Wallet to do so. To use the Wallet service I must give Yahoo my credit card info FOR THEM TO STORE. This is "for your convenience". Then I look at the Wallet TOS and see this: "Yahoo! will not be responsible for any purchases or errors made under your account or Yahoo! Wallet". So you're going to force me to let you store my number but will not take any responsibility for it. Forget that! Its one thing to make purchases online, another to let somebody store my cc #. I've used Yahoo mail and the POP service for a long time since it allows me to keep one email address regardless of ISP. It looks like that is coming to an end!
I just changed my settings back to "No", and now my yahoo POP3 won't accept my password. Think twice before changing your settings. So much for late April, looks like I'll need a new email address now.
One of the terms of service for turning POP access on was that you subscribe to Yahoo Delivers. Thus turning it off, they are enacting an EXISTING rule, not adding a new one
The reason your POP3 stopped now is likely because you unsubscribed from the "yahoo delivers!" option when you went to the account information. Yahoo delivers has always been a prerequisite to using pop3 or forwarding. Once you sign back on to it, you'll be able to start the pop3 again.
The yahoo delivers thing is not that annoying, as I have only gotten mail from it like once a month, and a lot of it has been genuinely interesting. The other stuff mentioned in this story you should definitely unsubscribe from though.
Here's the link for Yahoo's account deletion page. Pain to find on their site.
https://edit.yahoo.com/config/delete_user
Why blame on malice what you can blame on stupidity. Sounds more like a royal screw-up than a conscious decision. I mean, the extra load of undesired e-mail probably would cost them several million dollars in bandwidth and storage space. All you sys-admins should know that. Why would they do that for something that the user isn't going to read anyways?
Now, that doesn't make it ok, and I'm sure that some heads are going to roll for that, but I'm sure each person who reads this message has made a royal screw-up in their lifetime. Never blame on malice what you can blame on a moment stupidity.
___ This sig is in boldface to emphasize its importance!
Just set your address and phone number to their address and phone number and let them receive all your bulk mailings and telemarketing calls.
'Same speed C but faster'
If you'll look at it, while it doesn't specifically say Yahoo! on every one of them, there's still a separate portion for third-parties--Yahoo! Delivers stuff--and every single one of the options is related to an area where Yahoo! themselves provides services.
These are new options, as far as I can tell, so nothing's been 'reset', and I think they just made it the default that yes, you as a Yahoo! member would want to hear about Yahoo! services.
My Yahoo! Delivers options are completely untouched.
Yahoo has been providing forwarding for @rocketmail.com addresses ever since they bought them out. Does anyone know if they are planning to charge for this also?
"Yahoo! is notifying users of these changes to marketing preferences via email. Your new marketing preferences will not take effect until 60 days after the date the email is sent to you so you have plenty of time to decide what you want to receive and what you don't. To change your preferences, go to the Marketing Preferences page."
Of course who reads e-mail that comes from a yahoo account. They probably sent it and it got caught in a filter.
Something else interesting is that since I've just gone to Yahoo's site, now when I hit F3 to repeat my last search in IE, the Yahoo homepage pops up in a little sidebar window. Coincidence?
From their Privacy page
...
In addition, we have reset marketing preferences for some of our users. If you are one of those users, unless you decide to change these preferences, you may begin receiving marketing messages from Yahoo! about ways to enhance your Yahoo! experience, including special offers and new features.
Yahoo! is notifying users of these changes to marketing preferences via email. Your new marketing preferences will not take effect until 60 days after the date the email issent to you so you have plenty of time to decide what youwant to receive and what you don't. To change your preferences, go to the Marketing Preferences page.
Suppose all of us Yahoo users were to draft a hardcopy letter that goes something like this...
Dear Yahoo,
By copy if this letter, I am opting out of all marketing lists; my contact information is not to be used by Yahoo for marketing purposes, nor is it to be sold, shared, leased, lent, or revealed to any third parties. This letter supersedes any website settings and is in response to all past, present, and future requests for marketing permission. Any future requests for permission will be ignored, since this letter will serve as your notification until revoked by me in writing.
Should you make use of my contact information anyway, I will invoice you $5000 per message as a "reading fee". Abuse of my contact information constitues your agreement to pay the "reading fee", in addition to collection costs, court fees, and reasonable attorney's fees. I understand that $5000 per message is quite expensive -- do not use the service unless you intend to pay the fee.
I would love to see a service that offered to auto-send this kind of letter to all the "opt-in-by-default" morons. Even better if it could help facilitate the collection process.
I'm canceling all of my yahoo accounts as soon as I notify everyone who still uses them. The link is https://edit.yahoo.com/config/delete_user
Broadband companies go bankrupt... Ads on slashdot... Yahoo uses unethical measures to send more spam to users... Damn, it gets worse and worse :(
I am a genius; therefore, you suck.
It looked to me like when you go to edit your prefrences, all of the answers default to yes. Yahoo is not dumb enough to unilatterally change everyone's shit.
/. should wait for a legitimate jouralist to do some checking before posting this shit.
Slashdot is becoming more and more of a nuisance each and every day. Since the lazy sacks of shit who run this site are too lazy to check the facts on what they report, maybe
Is it that hard to call/email the Yahoo PR dept???
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
WoW!
Can't get into either my email or personal prefs in yahoo. First time this has happenned - the power of Slashdot!
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
First, my thanks to the diligent individual who shared this info. I have now 'opted-out' of all spam-laden preferences. I Suggest that readers consider doing as I do, and help to invalidate the data that Yahoo! sells, by going into the user information area and changing things like age, gender, income, occupation etc and change it OFTEN. Info is only as valuable as the data integrity allows. Fight SPAM, kick 'em where it hurts; Right in the Database.
"the smaller the mind, the bigger the noise it makes"
In case anyone can't find it..
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
408-349-2000
[...] we have reset marketing preferences for some of our users. If you are one of those users, unless you decide to change these preferences, you may begin receiving marketing messages from Yahoo! about ways to enhance your Yahoo! experience, including special offers and new features.
Yahoo! is notifying users of these changes to marketing preferences via email. Your new marketing preferences will not take effect until 60 days after the date the email is sent to you so you have plenty of time to decide what you want to receive and what you don't. To change your preferences, go to the Marketing Preferences page.
Well, it doesn't look that outrageous. Still, there's no hint as to why they did it.
Does anyone know how to delete your yahoo account? I looked all over the site and didn't see an
option anywhere for removing my account from their system.
I have no intentions of paying to use their service and no intentions of
using their web based interface to check my e-mail. So I have no
reason to keep an account on file with them. I'd just as soon
have the peace of mind that yahoo.com doesn't have any
of my information on file.
Now this is cool, I noticed that I've been getting a ton of messages in my bulk mail portion of my yahoo account, so I just deleted them. I'll betcha they were sending me these news letters or offers and then deleting them.
:)
Thank you yahoo, for sending me spam AND getting rid of it!
"By using Yahoo and viewing advertisements, you agree to have a behavior-modifying microchip implanted in you hippocampus, and will allow the corporate logos of our advertisers encoded in your junk DNA."
So it's not good, but not (yet) reason to start a riot...
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
> In related news, we've signed you all up for a /. newsletter! (I am so just kidding.)
:)
Actually, I wouldn't mind getting a slashdot newsletter. Bring it on!!!
Free You Mind
Again, my apologies if someone else posted this.
It's nice to believe that slashdot is somehow "different" from "other" websites. But please recall that yahoo's founder Jerry Yang was a very philanthropic, fair, and decent person when he started yahoo. Yahoo is more and more like a parasitic growth that's devouring that initial genius...if it could happen to Yahoo, it can happen to Slashdot even faster.
Well, lookie, lookie at what low-life I found... I used to actually try to use some Yahoo! services to help them out (shopping, buying more e-mail space) because I liked their service. No more...
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
They would love my 976 number then. ;)
P.S. For those of you that are outside N. Americal, 976 numbers are chargable phone numbers often used by the adult industries.
I wonder if there would be any value in a list of people who quickly heard of the new policy and opted out before the deadline? Propose an opt-out policy of questionable legality with a grace period, gather lists of accounts who discovered/heard about it and acted, but then never actually act on the change you proposed.
(Occam's razor is for wimps)
...if you were dumb enough to give them your primary e-mail address. I always give outfits like this a hotmail one and they can spam the shit out of it for all I care. In the case of my Yahoo account, the e-mail they have is one I haven't used for two years now, so spam away boys!
You're using her as bait, Master!
You're such an angry person. You need a hug.
{{{ YOU }}}
hth
.
Anyone know of less-corrupt free e-mail providers who offer POP access? Any excuse to keep me from setting up my own mail server?
"Ford," he said, "you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."
Yahoo used to be a pretty cool mail service, a place to have a permanent email address regardless of where you were at, but that has changed, now they have removed some of the best features pop and forwarding, and you have to put up with ads and spam.
And then they want you to pay through the nose for the pop and forwarding. For 25MB extra storage space I was already paying $30 per year, which should be more than enough to cover their costs for my account.
Fortunately Yahoo is not the only one in this space. Of course, there is hotmail, but unfortunately it's even worse, i.e. spam and only 2mb storage space, so it's better to try something else.
Emailaddresses.com has a list of free web based emails and for a fee emails. I'll probably be switching to Runbox.com which offers 100MB for 3 years for $59, with no ads and a lot more features than yahoo offers for the same price.
hushmail.com might be a good one if you always run IE as your web browser.
I'd be interested to know of any other decent web and pop email service alternatives.
Just change the e-mail address to marketing@yahoo.com. Change the snail-mail to something in North Korea, Iraq, Somalia. Or perhaps something more subtle. Distant towns in Alaska that can only be reached by dogsled when things are frozen? I bet they could use the burning material. Use your imagination. Be creative.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Here is a page that explains why yahoo has made these changes:
3 .h tml
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/privacy/privacy-2
At the bottom of the page, you can click on the "no" button to go to a contact form where you can tell Yahoo exactly why their behaviour isn't acceptable.
I wasn't so upset over them resetting my email preferences, but I was *pissed* that they also reset my phone preferences. That's going one step too far in my opinion.
Gentoo Linux http://gentoo.org/
To leave a user input for the email that all the "partner" announcements are to be sent. I left all my choices to yes and changed the email account to abuse@yahoo.com
HAHA, stick that in your spam hole and smoke it.
I went and checked, and I had about 20 different SPAM options turned on! Without slashdot, I would NEVER have known about this until the spam started rolling in! Mark me as redundant if you want, but I wanted to make sure people knew this was real.
I apologize if this post seems like a rant. It is. I'm infuriated yet again by this trend of corporate corruption which is more of an explanation than an excuse. I'm really pissed at Yahoo. But I'm even more pissed at AT&T at the moment, but I'll get to that in a moment. At least with yahoo, I can do exactly what I did which was delete or change any possible information that could possibly give them something to sell to someone. Then I changed my password to some really freaking obscure password that I'll never remember in a million years. I tried to cancel their account, but to no avail, I can't seem to find out how to cancel my account. I tried. But their little rat maze doesn't seem to be set up for people to cancel their accounts. I'm not surprised.
:) I feel better now.
Now on to AT&T. I have a question. Has anyone else had the experience of calling AT&T directory information to find a number only to be told by some automated voice, "Press pound to hear the number." At which point, you press pound happily expecting to hear the number. Instead of hearing the number, you instead hear the voice of the receptionist of the place you desired to call manually. Keep in mind I always write down the number so that I can manually call the number instead of paying the , "I'm a lazy moron." tax. Most non-thinking people would dismiss it as a freak occurence. I don't. I verified my facts. I got charged the moron tax against my will. I'm confident many others have been charged this tax against their will as well. Now I desire to verify it. How many of you have been charged the moron tax against your will? If it's thousands of people who have been subjected to the "moron" tax against their will, then I'd say AT&T has got quite the scam going and is a shining example of what may soon be widely known as the "Rat Tactic". I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt for the moment.
I must say that I am never surprised at the corruption I find in Corporate America.
(One of my personal least favorite scams is the customer service automated systems that never seem to have the option I need unless of course I want to sign up for their service my ISP my cellphone service provider.) You say that's not a scam, but I say that it is especially when I'm trying to complain about something that could result in a loss of millions of dollars by customers collectively, not individually. It feels like a scam that ranks right up there with the guy who took a few pennies out of millions of bank accounts. By the way, is that an urban legend? Even if it is, the principle is sound. And I'd say it's the principle that corporations rely upon the most to jilt the masses out of billions fo dollars. It might be aptly called the "Rip off the masses by small amounts so nobody will notice and you can grow rich in your big house while you watch society decline into a group of mindless drone rats that never complain that wake up every day just to work for you, consume your products, fsck , eat, drink, poop, pay taxes, fart, and breathe while never really having one meaningful thought during the day. (all while using your products)" tactic. Personally, I affectionately call it the "Rat Tactic" for possibly arbitrary reasons.
We, the complainers, the ones willing to speak up are unfortunately a very small minority. "They" count on that and count on their automated systems to oppose our attempts for satisfaction (while vigorously using the rat tactic). Is there any other reason it takes two seconds to get to a customer service rep when you want to order service. But if you want to complain, that's another story altogether. If you want to complain, "they" conveniently use technology to thwart your efforts. The most common mechanism is the setting up automated mazes for us to traverse so that by the time we get ahold of a real person, we're so infuriated that the low level customer service rep immediately calls his/her supervisor for assistance. He, of course, solves MY problem by crediting me the seventy five cents I'm due while happily keeping the money of the thousands of "sheep" rats unwilling to complain.
Well today I was too infuriated to traverse the maze for very long and now I'm venting on slashdot. I hope it sends a resoundingly clear message to Corporate Earth which is this: "We know what is going on and we are growing in numbers and discontent."
At least I hope that's the message that they get, but my message is more likely going to be ignored by the greedy guy in the big house who looks down upon us as rats that need our wheels, our mazes, and plenty of shiny things. Well I've got news for "them", I'm not a rat that likes wheels or mazes. I kind of enjoy using my brain. I don't worship their god of money. I'm sorry, but exercise wheels and mazes just don't do it for me. Though to be honest, I do like a few shiny things. But the truth is I'm not a rat at all. I am a human. And I'm not too distracted with my wheel, mazes, and shiny things that I won't make the time to bitch.
So everybody join me in bitching about something that's bothering you. They can't kill us all. Perhaps we can successfully discourage some of the rampant greed and corruption by curbing peoples' purchasing habits. And maybe, just maybe, we won't become a species that is somewhere between rats running on exercise wheels, the Ferengi, and the Borg.
Thanks for listening
I have been forced to set an auto-reply up for this account to inform people of my new address. Hopefully, the spammers won't bother reading the auto-reply, especially since they use bogus headers anyway.
I have too many email accounts anyway.
I work with a lot of older people who don't read Slashdot, but have Yahoo. I made sure to tell them about this new disgrace. For all those at work, please do the same; it's a courteous thing to do, and your workplace will be a helluva lot happier.
There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
In less than 5 minutes, in less time than it took some of you guys to fume about how TERRIBLE this is, I actually changed my prefs back to "don't send me anything" status. Thank you to the anonymous coward who brought this to my attention, and sorry I don't feel like getting terribly worked up about this.
-- I Am Not A Terrorist.
...so I wouldn't have gotten that junk mail anyway.
Nevertheless, I logged in, and, sure enough, everything was set to "yes". I promptly set everything to "no".
Thanks for the tip.
This space left intentionally blank.
Yahoo Groups is home to a lot of special interests that I follow, mostly astronomy-related. The participants are getting particularly annoyed at the ads, since they foist them off on the email-participants as well as the on-website participants, who have been slogging through ads to read the damn list for some time now.
I don't mind advertising, it's a necessary evil for a lot of websites. But when it gets to the point that it drives people away, you're doing something wrong. The people on these astronomy lists are not rabid anti-spam geeks, they are not the type to setup automated Spamcop-reporting procmail recipes on their inbox. They have a lot of disposable income, since astro-imaging is not exactly a cheap hobby to get into (expenses are comparable to owning a large boat or an airplane, in many cases). Those are the people being driven away by excessive advertising.
Edith Keeler Must Die
If you're like me, and filled out fake address and phone information, consider leaving those boxes checked to "yes". Wastes them money if they have to send out paper junk mail to people who don't exist.
Do you think if enough people added Yahoo to their block lists they would get a clue?
Clue by 4's are in rare supply at yahoo today.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
From Yahoo!'s Privacy page:
Yahoo! is notifying users of these changes to marketing preferences via email. Your new marketing preferences will not take effect until 60 days after the date the email is sent to you so you have plenty of time to decide what you want to receive and what you don't.
Look, Yahoo needs to do more marketing to survive. They're reorganizing how they're going to do it and in the process they're going to set people to sign up by default. However, long before anyone receives any mailing from these new services, you have the ability to opt out. The opt out period is 60 days (2 monthes for those who can't do the math).
Considering that it takes a whole minute to set everything to "No", 60 days is more than enough time. It's not like they have gone off and said "You gotta send us a stamp self-address envelope" to get off our mailinglists...
You'd be amazed the number of free-registration-required sites you'll be able to get into using billg@microsoft.com and the zipcode in Redmond as a password.
Nope, no sig
My primary email address (at least what I told Yahoo) was an @Yahoo account, which I never access.
My alternate email account at Yahoo was an @home account, which is now dead.
When @home was still working, I created a secondary email address under my main account just for SPAM, which I never accessed and which I canceled every few months and replaced with another disposable address.
So even though they've changed their marketing settings, I'll never receive any of it anyway.
Assist them in slashdotting themselves. Leave the 'by mail' and 'by phone' option on and set your address to:
:}
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, California 94089
Phone (408) 349-3300
Fax (408) 349-3301
Inspired by MImeKillEr.
For a whole 1 minute of your time, we can collectively inspire Yahoo to slashdot itself.
I also reccomend leaving all the marketing preferences set to Yes, but redirecting the delivery address to your secondary, which can be any of your dearest and most loving advertisers.
I think that the idea has occurred to others, since the yahoo corporate info page containing their address appears to be quite sluggish.
-ted
Glad to see that Yahoo has learned from Steve Case's example. I wrote about this in 1999 when AOL pulled this one
One-click spamming.
That is one silly patent that I actually would like to see pass. (Just hope one-click spam disabling is not also included.)
Table-ized A.I.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
When you turn off the marketting preferences, it turns off forwarding/pop3. it doesnt go into effect perm until April 24th. But you NEED to have the "yahoo delivers" stuff under your mail options set to "send me crap"
i noticed this too.
What they are really doing, however, is making sure that spam doesn't get through unless its from a Yahoo! Partner (tm).
But I just noticed that my street address and phone number are way out of date in my Yahoo account. I just updated it. Here's my new street address, to which all my paper mail will be sent:Of course, no one but me should be using that street address. I wouldn't want to get flooded with a bunch of paper spam at "my" street address, so don't any of you go changing your street address to send me any of your offers. No sir, that would not be very nice. Don't do that.
Edith Keeler Must Die
I have been a long time Yahoo user. I use the "My Yahoo" page daily, my @yahoo.com e-mail address is my primary web mail account, and I have purchased several things through the Yahoo shops.
The amount of spam on yahoo mail has jumped dramatically in the last few months. I have noticed that the spam has more and more personal information (first name, last name, etc.). Their ads have also become much more intrusive and obnoxious.
So, today I went through and removed every bit of personal information from my yahoo accounts & preferences. I was surprised to see just how much was in there.. It takes some digging, make sure you follow all of their sub-categories. I deleted information wherever possible. Some places did not allow blank entries (addresses, phone numbers) so, I replaced them with bogus entries.
And, yes.. I know they need to make money to pay for their services. But they need to be careful to avoid pissing off too many customers, or their usage goes down & they have to add more ads & sell their data to more spammers to stay afloat.
I love it when /. headline sounds like something from the onion.
Good thing I put in my ex-girlfriend's contact information, huh? ;)
Is you want to use POP you must pay for the privilige. This was either on C|Net or a yahoo announcement. Since I never used the POP feature it was no big deal
IIRC the fee is $20/year.
HTH
A) Of course, no one puts their REAL personal information in a yahoo account, right? Put in the phone number for the White House switchboard.
B) Put a forwarding rule to forward all mail to postmaster@yahoo.com. That'll teach 'em.
"Population 1,656"
Just sign up anyone listed in these documents.
That should nip this in the bud in 60 days or so.
(flamebait warning)This is news why? Its not like people pay for the yahoo service anyway, they can do what they want! If you dont want spam, then get yer own email!
Moneygrabbing pro-spam Nazi memorabilia loving bastards.
Yeah, yeah, I know this post is too late for anyone to read, but I thought I'd say it anyway. After reading this article, I not only went to reset my opt-outs, I changed all my personal information to something more appropriate... like a fake address and phone number.
Face it, Yahoo! is on a slippery slope, and going down fast. Every time they pull one of these shenanigans, they loose customers. I was already cutting loose from their e-mail due to the no-free-pop decision. I use their my.yahoo as my default browser home page, but about one more such "marketing decision", and I'll be moving over to MSN or some Lycos.
Here's a tip. Instead of setting up dummy yahoo/hotmail accounts for your spam mail, try http://dea.spamcon.org. They allow you to set up as many as 3 cuurently active random e-mail address that are forwarded to your primary account. They can be turned on/off at will (once you've gotten the password to the porn site). With some nice JavaScript copy/paste functionality, it is very easy to use without having to remember some rather cryptic e-mail addresses.
Lord, bless my users that they may stop being such fucking idiots!!
Actually yahoo has a lot of my personal information when I signed up for yahoo banking and decided to pay 20$ for extra mail space. As it turns out, the $20 I paid doesn't even give me free pop access anymore. Oh, well, I'll be cancelling pretty soon.
Robert Nagle, Austin, Texas Idiotprogrammer
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
(That is, Abbie H wrote "Steal this book.") Read his autobiography for an interesting, crazy story, then read the (less fun) book by his younger brother called "Run Run Run: the Lives of Abbie Hoffman." (At least I think that's the subtitle.)
and let them deal with the mail looping.
*cackle*
AntiChristX
Daring to remain below 5 karma indefinitely
This just happened to me.
Before they reset the changes I never received a single piece of spam. (remember the POP forwarding allowed them to send me a ad once a week and anything else sent by yahoo I don't consider spam).
Now, I have new spam in my mailbox, and 5 in the junkbox.
Wow. Could it be they gave ALL THAT INFO out to third parties in exchange for money, and now that one dishonorable company sold that list to another dishonorable company I will start receiving spam exponentially?
Can someone suggest another "free" email forwarding webmail service I can switch to?
I just checked again, and I got another one. *sigh*
Anyone else experiencing more spam than usual?
GOOGLE, SAVE US BY OFFERING WEBMAIL....I'LL PAY 5 BUCKS A YEAR!!!! USD EVEN!!!
- YoGrark
- a tagline with an ending is
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
I think there's a technical fault going on with at least some international Yahoo sites at the moment.
I've just been to check my marketing preferences, and there were no options listed. The page was there, a check-all link was on the page, and there was a save button, but there weren't any options listed.
Furthermore I went to check the terms of service. I was told that I'd have to agree to a new terms of service for Australia and New Zealand "described below", but apart from that statement there was a blank page with an Accept/Deny button at the bottom. All I can conclude is that there's been a technical error or they've withdrawn their terms of service. (I'm betting on the former for obvious reasons.)
There's another rotten trick buried in this. After you get through My Yahoo --> Account Info (a hyperlink at the top of the page) --> Change Marketing Preferences (a hyperlink in the middle of the page), you finally reach the opt-in/opt out lists. There are two DIFFERENT "save changes" buttons, one at the bottom for the U.S. mail and by-phone, and one at the top for all the spam-mail. You must go through the form TWICE and hit each button ONCE in order to change both sections.
Vile.
I never really use my yahoo email account anyway, so I'll just let it fill up. Why not.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
I always give the physical address and phone number of people I don't like. Harnessing nature's forces to fight evil.
I think I should share something with the /. crowd.
Whenever a site requires online registration, I generally enter fuck_everyone@microsoft.com. The email's domain is dependant on the site I'm regestering at. This makes it easy to be able to login to sites like the NYTimes. I also chuckle to myself thinking about the admins of these sites when they stumble accross my account. It would be interesting to hear from the guys by the bottled water coolers, "I just found an account with fuck_everyone@yahoo.com as their primary email address."
This is the Internet. You can say "fuck" here. - AC
Just change your email address (the one they send spam to) to jerry.yang@yahoo.com or root@127.0.0.1 or something like that. Set your snail mail address to
Yahoo Users Group
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
They only are doing it because you let them.
Free service? Not POP/SMTP access or forwarding of Yahoo! Mail... I've been quietly abandoning my (previously useful) Yahoo accounts.
Off-topic, but does anyone know of any scripts which will automate the retrieval of webmail messages and queue them in your regular mail spool?
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
From the TOS "1. ACCEPTANCE OF TERMS Welcome to Yahoo!. Yahoo provides its service to you, subject to the following Terms of Service ("TOS"), which may be updated by us from time to time without notice to you. " And also from the Privacy Policy: "Information Sharing and Disclosure Yahoo! does not rent, sell, or share personal information about you with other people or nonaffiliated companies except ... under the following circumstances:
We provide the information to trusted partners.." etc.
If you read the entire Privacy Policy it will probably surprise you a bit. They collect a lot of personal information. They say they won't share it with other people, except when they want to and when the other people promise not to share it.
So I think they can do pretty much whatever they want to, because they told you they might.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
E-mail addresses:
copyright@yahoo-inc.com
yhoocc@yahoo-inc.com (Yahoo Customer "Care")
investor_relations@yahoo-inc.com
Address:
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
United States
Phone:
408-349-5070
(408) 349-5070
Privacy Policy [sic] support number.
Change your info to this:
Yahoo Internet Life
18301 Von Karman Ave, Irvine, CA 92612
Phone: (949) 494-1122
How strange it is to be anything at all
I think its great. I run spam trap accounts on my machine, and any time these things want an email address, I give them my trap addresses. It automatically submits it to razor to it will get blocked from other networks as well.
Of course, I also gave them a postal address. Not a real one, but if they want to play this game, they can pay the postage..
Either button saved the changes to the entire page.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
I've edited my settings (after logging in visit http://subscribe.yahoo.com/showaccount) -- much better :)
Derek Alfonso, Host
The Power of Information
http://powerofinformation.net
National Tech Talk Radio
For those who are wondering what that address is, it's the Yahoo HQ...
Oregon has a No Call List also. I think our fines are even higher. It costs me $3 per year to be on it and it works.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Registrant:
Yahoo (YAHOO-DOM)
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
US
Domain Name: YAHOO.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Administrator, Domain (DA16065) domainadmin@YAHOO-INC.COM
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
US
1-408-530-5062
Billing Contact:
Billing, Domain (DB28833) domainbilling@YAHOO-INC.COM
Yahoo! Inc.
225 Broadway, 13th Floor
San Diego, CA 92101
1-408-731-3300
Record last updated on 12-Mar-2002.
Record expires on 20-Jan-2010.
Record created on 18-Jan-1995.
Database last updated on 29-Mar-2002 07:23:00 EST.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.YAHOO.COM 66.218.71.63
NS2.YAHOO.COM 209.132.1.28
NS3.YAHOO.COM 217.12.4.104
NS4.YAHOO.COM 63.250.206.138
NS5.YAHOO.COM 64.58.77.85
--------
Yahoo! (NETBLK-A-YAHOO-U23)
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, California 94089
US
Netname: A-YAHOO-U23
Netblock: 66.218.64.0 - 66.218.79.255
Maintainer: YAOO
Coordinator:
Admin, Netblock (NA258-ARIN) netblockadmin@yahoo-inc.com
1-408-349-5555
Domain System inverse mapping provided by:
NS1.YAHOO.COM 66.218.71.63
NS2.YAHOO.COM 209.132.1.28
NS3.YAHOO.COM 217.12.4.104
NS4.YAHOO.COM 63.250.206.138
NS5.YAHOO.COM 64.58.77.85
ADDRESSES WITHIN THIS BLOCK ARE NON-PORTABLE
Record last updated on 25-Mar-2002.
Database last updated on 28-Mar-2002 19:58:29 EDT.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Still sleazy, but maybe not as bad as you think - they won't be spamming you right away, and you DO have the opportunity to decline between now and then.
sad but true.
spamgourmet offers unlimited free disposable email addresses that you can have forward to any real address. You don't have to create them on the website, just give one to somebody and it gets created the first time *they* use it. I never trusted Yahoo, anyway...
Just add "ybl.megacity.org" to your standard DNSBL configurations in your MTA of choice and away you go.
This public service brought to you by...me.
D
D'oh! Curse you, Post Anonymously box, why are you so small and hard to click? :)
I just set my email address on Yahoo to investor_relations@yahoo-inc.com. That (hopefully) will take care of that problem.
On another note, how does one go about getting rid of a Yahoo account? I'm gonna miss my TV listings, but I wasn't really watching it that much anyway. And the movie listings were pretty handy as well. Anyone know of a replacement site where I can get that info? (Our local theatre is a small chain and isn't really into the web that much.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
If you're like many, and haven't enabled pop3 access until now, you are probably discovering that they aren't making it obvious how to enable pop3 forwarding for you. Makes it kind of hard to get your email off their system before it becomes fee based, doesn't it?
What they aren't telling you is that until April 24th, the flag they are using to control whether you have pop3 access is still changable by you!
Here's what you do:
Hope that helps some of you.
And you should address the mail to Srinija Srinivasan, since she's the one quoted in the article as being all behind this new move.
A better number would be 349-3300 (the main number, press zero for an operator).
D
Looks like they also reset all of the day's stock quotes; all of the ones i have set there have been reset to a change of zero for the day.
... to anyone who posts Srinivasa Ramanujan's (or whatever the fucking bitch's name is) email address here.
I mean it.
I already had yahoo.com messages flagged as spam. I thought with the move to a pay system they'd drive out the spammers, but instead they've decided to become spammers themselves. No problem, they can stay in the filters.
A few months ago E-Bay did the same thing to me. They sent me an e-mail saying they had changed all my preferences. If I minded I should let them know. I sent them a nasty note ("I want all my preferences back the way they were, you weasels!!") and surprisingly I got a contrite human-generated note saying "sorry".
It seems they are UPDATING the profile information and account information pages AS WE SPEAK. Ive seen them change just recently to make it more visible the options. I guess theyre feeling the pinch :D I just removed some accounts and setup others with their details and others for spam:D Not only their service but also by proxy adding THEM to services :D
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Before reading the CNET story, I submitted a gripe via their "Privacy Policy Feedback" form. To their credit I received frighteningly quick response ( less than 1 minute ). It said much the same thing as the CNET article (email forthcoming, 60 days, yadda yadda) but also included this, I think, important distinction:
Please note that these new preference categories only relate to how
Yahoo! communicates with you about Yahoo! products and services. Your
Yahoo! Delivers preference, regarding special offers from our selected
partners, remains as you selected it:
Does anybody know what their stock is doing :D
:D
Upwards or downwards since this recent move?
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Google found some more Yahoos for me:
Yahoo HQ
Phone (408) 349-3300
Fax (408) 349-3301
3420 Central Expy, Santa Clara, CA 95051
Phone (408) 731-3300
160 Spear St, San Francisco, CA 94105
Phone (415) 618-0385
5960 Mandarin Dr, Goleta, CA 93117
Phone (805) 696-6766
I just noticed one more thing that has changed inside yahoo's 'Edit Member Information' page. You are no longer allowed to change your birthdate. The field to change birthdate looks like following...
Birthdate: Not displayed for security reasons
Security reasons??? What security reasons?? I guess the next thing they will do is publish our email addresses to every known spammer on the face of the earth and disable the option to opt-out of it. (For security reasons, of course!!)
Its been that way ever since I can remember. Considering that your birthday can typically be used to identify you (along with little other information), and I think Yahoo! asks for you to enter your birthday if you forget your password, this is a security issue. And think about it what legitimate reason (in their mind) would you have to change this information? You were born when you were born, after all; unlike your name and address, this is rather immutable.
:)
Besides, I always use 1970-01-01 so its easy enough to remember (epoch=0), and I have no reason to change it.
Liberty in your lifetime
Web Beacons.
Then find the last line of the 3rd bulleted paragraph and click on the text Click here. You might want to read the text.
Or perhaps you might wish to click Just Make The Web Beacons Stop Now!.
Is it me or did they top off the pref-unsetting experience by rewarding me with a pop-under? :P
I, like many, registered on Yahoo a long time ago, in order to be able to use their online communities, Chat, and other services. I never set up a Yahoo email account. The email address (required in their registration) they had was my personal account on my ISP, so they would have spammed that--much worse than a free account on their server. And yes, I confirmed that even my account, with no yahoo email account attached to it, had its preferences changed too.
Really pretty outrageous. Damages the whole industry 'self-regulation' efforts, and makes it that much easier for misguided legislation to get passed.
Give them one of these for your street address and phone number (unless of course you need them to have your real information):
:)
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
1-408-530-5062
or
225 Broadway, 13th Floor
San Diego, CA 92101
1-408-731-3300
Then set the mail/phone marketing preferences to YES. Why these addresses? `whois yahoo.com` to find out why.
Liberty in your lifetime
I just checked my settings for this -- didn't realize there was this section... Anyway, none of them were checked. So, I added abuse@127.0.0.1 as my alternate email, and said yes to all the options listed at= http ://subscribe.yahoo.com/showaccount
/. community is fucking with them..!!
http://subscribe.yahoo.com/showmailsubs?.done
Then I changed the delivery address for all the options (travel newsletter, shopping specials, etc) to abuse@127.0.0.1.
In addition to this, I added abuse@127.0.0.1 as my main address under Delivery Options (main page of new section).
Let them deal with the headache... I just wish there was some way of knowing just how badly the
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
Yahoo's not the only one: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/01/09/164825 7&mode=thread
sounds like it's time to move it away from the corporations. Run linux. turn off popups. Linux is about the users, not the corporations...and i think it might be a solution to this problem. i'm not saying that linux is there, now. it needs a little gui work and more experience saturation in the world. But its the solution. You can get rid of your trojans. you can ssh in to help them. they don't really even need ads.
Yeah. people say, "linux isn't user-friendly." Screw them. I say windows isn't user-friendly. It is full of ads. it crashes way too much. it is proprietary, handled by one corporation that is under trial (TRIAL!) now. and there are way too many viruses.
contrast this with linux. with a little experience and help, users can run IceWM and be quite happy. if you dont want to do that, run KDE. With a little tweaking, it almost IS the MS Gui. Linux lets you IM, email, solitaire, watch a few movies, just about whatever you need. My mom uses her pc to email. that's it. My dad uses his to do office work, watch an occasional movie...and maybe a game of solitaire or something. They represent a hefty chunk of the user base that could easily switch. They get sick of all the corporations, too, the ad's, the spam. a few tweaks to Mozilla gets rid of the ads...spam isn't too hard either. I agree...the modern internet blows in some aspects. but that doesn't mean you have to just complain, you can do something about it.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
Back in the good old days Yahoo was a great way of finding misc. web sites, it started offering a lot of great free services, got very popular, and now has to charge for everything and practice very shady things like selling off your email addy to the lowest bidder. If it goes under I won't cry too much for it now.
But needless to say I will only use Yahoo for it's web database, just like in the old days, heh. Thank goodness for google!
Amusingly enough, the CNet story got onto the syndicate feeds and ended up on the front page of My Yahoo.
Note also at the bottom, that you will be marked YES for 'By US Mail' and 'By Phone' as well.
:D
This should be pretty damn obvious, but you shouldn't give them your real US mail address and phone number anyway when you sign up. I almost never give those out, and guess what? I get maybe one telemarketing call a month (neener neener neener!) And when I do get them, I tell them to go f--k themselves, which usually deters them from calling back. Perhaps that's actually what they're doing?
Basically, what it comes down to is that if you want your privacy protected, you have to really take steps to guard it yourself. You can't just give your information out to anybody that asks for it and expect them to respect your privacy.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Your resetting of marketing preferences without authorization has shown me that your company has no integrity. I have never given you my phone number, address, or credit card number, and I never will in the future. Your disregard for even the known explicit preferences of your users simply demonstrates that you have no respect for your customers, and that you are a dishonest group of people. Wouldn't you like the work of thousands of people to stand for more than earnings per share?
https://edit.yahoo.com/config/delete_user
(See the help section.)
Yahoo sucks phat dick.....they're as fucking lame as hotmail...
"Look where we worship" -- Jim Morrison
"Note also at the bottom, that you will be marked YES for 'By US Mail' and 'By Phone' as well."
:)
I can't remember when I last typed in my real information on a site. Unless of course it was credit card information.
IMHO, the key to get good info is to require nothing but an email adr, age and password to begin with, and then ask another question for each service/feature people enable on the site.
The idea of wanting to know everything at one just makes people back out, at least me.
Has anyone noticed how sites that asks lots of questions, have "hidden" counter-questions.
If you give them inaccurate information to the registration questions, you risk having your account deactivated. From the Yahoo Terms of Service:
In consideration of your use of the Service, you agree to: (a) provide true, accurate, current and complete information about yourself as prompted by the Service's registration form (such information being the "Registration Data") and (b) maintain and promptly update the Registration Data to keep it true, accurate, current and complete. If you provide any information that is untrue, inaccurate, not current or incomplete, or Yahoo has reasonable grounds to suspect that such information is untrue, inaccurate, not current or incomplete, Yahoo has the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of the Service (or any portion thereof).
I found it very interesting that the new privacy policy so explicitly specifies what will happen if they are acquired. Something has to be in the works.
Given their recent behavior, it sounds rather like they are trying to fit into the AOL culture.
Mmmm.. Donuts
There's a killer robot clone on the loose and he looks like Queen Elizabeth. BEWARE!!!
Yesterday I wrote an article on how Google, for all its good Netizenship, has sold out to the spaming industry.
If you enter the search query "bulk email" you'll see that Google is quite happy to play its role in the promotion of spamware and spamming services -- by way of the list of paid-advertisements down the right-hand side of the page promoting such products and services.
Surprisingly, I had a raft of feedback from readers who seem to think that there's nothing wrong with Google carrying paid advertising for the promotion of spamware and spamming services.
I know that over the past seven years I've started and run (and sold) a number of very successful ad-funded online publications and I've never felt that I had to stoop so low as to accept advertising dollars from spammers.
Perhaps I'm just one of a dying breed of entrepreneurs who are prepared to put his money where his mouth is in the battle against spam.
I see this latest move by Yahoo to simply be part of a slow but inevitable move towards the day when we're all forced to swallow our daily diet of spam along with the few little morsels that are actually real email.
I'm tempted to keep the settings as they are. A while ago I set my mailing address to:
1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Washington, DC 20500-0001
At any rate I'm noticing the site is running a tad sluggishly. Have we slashdotted Yahoo?
...that they send them to your Yahoo! e-mail account?
Does anyone here even use those for stuff other than spamtraps anyway?
I mod down anyone who uses M$ in their posts. I like to live on the edge.
Slashdot's getting about as reliable as The Enquirer.
3 .h tml
You are given explicit notice of the new options and how to set them. You have 60 days before they go into effect. You can all put down your pitchforks.
This was all explained by the "Help" button:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/privacy/privacy-2
*What are marketing preferences and did Yahoo! change my preferences?*
Yahoo! has grown and changed a great deal over the past few years. In order to keep you up to date about our many new products and services and how they might be of use to you, we have created a new Marketing Preferences page within the Account Information area. It is designed to make it easier for you to manage the marketing communications you receive from Yahoo! and ensure you get the latest relevant information to meet your needs.
In addition, we have reset marketing preferences for some of our users. If you are one of those users, unless you decide to change these preferences, you may begin receiving marketing messages from Yahoo! about ways to enhance your Yahoo! experience, including special offers and new features.
Yahoo! is notifying users of these changes to marketing preferences via email. Your new marketing preferences will not take effect until 60 days after the date the email is sent to you so you have plenty of time to decide what you want to receive and what you don't. To change your preferences, go to the Marketing Preferences page.
Please note that these new preference categories only relate to how Yahoo! communicates with you about Yahoo! products and services. Your Yahoo! Delivers preference, regarding special offers from our selected partners, remains as you selected it.
HotMail did the same... even set "Share my registration information" to yes. This info includes county, region, state, ZIP, gender and a few other goodies.
This seems like a prime opportunity to strike back at Yahoo by
1) immediately changing all previously accurate personal information to fake info and
2) tracking and boycotting any and all e-commerce sites that supply Yahoo with personal information.
Otherwise, even if you do 'make sure' that your phone and snail are spamproof, the next time you order 50 blank CDRs you'll get an extra added gift.
I'd take the time to send a nasty email or two to the folks who advertise with Yahoo, as well -- let them know how their aggressive marketing tactics make you want to avoid buying ANYTHING from them, much less the cheap crap they're peddling.
Slightly off-topic, but does anyone know of a good open source implementation of email group software? I'd like to migrate from Yahoo groups ASAP before it turns into a nightmare, too. Feel free to NOT spam me at mark UNDERSCORE huisman AT yahoo DOT com
If a company goes to such measures, it's usually because they have bad numbers and nothing to lose.. So many things go bad with Yahoo in the last months (egroups, huuuuge banners, defunct acounts don't get fixed) - I'd hope to say otherwise, but I think there will be more bad news from Yahoo in the future...
Well my Yahoo account is a bit broken: I can't delete "My Yahoo"-modules and edit my bookmarks. I mailed them about 10 times so far, the always replies and never fixed it in the past 4 months now. You know what the fun part is? Since today I can't access my account options to opt out of this stuff... funny :-(
nope. this is common to just about every preference or email management page has buttons bot top and bottom. this is actually a nice feature since you don't havt to scroll all the way down to the bottom of a page to hit 'submit' (or vice versa). 'course, just hitting the enter key usually submits the form anyway.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
yahoo is TRUSTe-certified. they're a privacy watchdog. file a complaint @ http://www.truste.org/users/users_watchdog.html
Darn. How do you cancel a Yahoo! account then?
Trustee is utterly worthless, see http://www.dnso.com/comics/2002/Feb/21/
when you activated pop mail forwarding they made you acknowledge that they were going to turn all of your marketing prefs to yes. When you set them back to no your pop mail password was rejected. try setting them all back to yes and you should be able to connect again until April (or whenever they actually pull the plug on pop).
woofBARK
First, this is at least the second time Yahoo has done this...
Second, and most importantly, once the damage is done, it's permanent. Some of the settings allow Yahoo to sell and/or give away your email address, so going back to Yahoo and changing the settings back is an "already too late" action. The damage is done, and who knows how many companies your email address has been given and sold to? Yahoo refused to discuss that issue in the few emails they and I sent back and forth.
Third, this so far has happened with each "major" system change (3 times according to a friend of mine who has a Yahoo ID longer than I - I only know of 2 that I caught on to)... so how many more times will they do this? Hmmmm... every time they need to make a few more bucks and sell their entire subscriber list? Perhaps...
Fourth, why hasnt anyone sued them yet? This spells class action to me...
Robert
WebMaster:
BinFeeds
XXX Thumbnailed Image Newsgroups but
My idea... :-) Just a thought, something to have fun with.
I say let them forward all the spam. Set up your account to get all the Yahoo! crap mail, and have it send to a dummy address somewhere else, which in turn will forward it all to whatever the Yahoo! abuse address is. Might be abuse@yahoo.com? I think if everyone did that, and they got tons of abuse messages every time they sent spam, they may not like that too much.
Tell them Large Marge sent ya.
If you recall when you signed up for POP access and forwarding you also signed up for Yahoo! Delivers, on your marketing preferences set that to a Yes and you will have your pop access till April whatever.
... is to lie. Apparently I'm a female construction worker, and only 3 years old too - :-)
precocious, huh
The important thing is the age - if you're less than 13 they don't bombard you with any crap at all...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
No change to my yahoo.ca profile...
D.
I go to SlashDot, read an article, and in it is a bit of information I can actually USE to make my computing experience better? This happened too close to Easter, I'm going to church.
Windows XP SP2 told me to install third-party software that prevents viruses and protects stability... I chose Ubuntu
Hmmm, Yahoo "protects us from spam" with the Bulk Mail folder and the ability to block the sender, but changes our settings automatically to accept more spam. I'm switching to Hotmail...oh wait
http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/privacy/cgi_feed back
QED
I'm not gonna bother wasting my time with the preferences. I'll just treat them like any other "opt-out" spammer.
They'll get blacklisted by the various spam fighting organizations, my filtering will trash all their mail, their users will suddenly find they can't send e-mail to half the Internet, and within a week or two they'll have to change their policy.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
From www.yahoo.com main page:D
--
new! Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball - sign up today for the 2002 season new
--
should read
--
new! Yahoo! Fantasy EMail - sign up today for the 2002 spam season new
--
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
I'm not really worried. Its a bogus account anyway. Besides, I imagine it'll be a while (if ever) before they even bother to check if the info is valid.
Even if they did, what's to stop me from making another one and doing the same? Not much..
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
what's yahoo?
Another TrustE certification I noticed on the linked page... You may delete your account at any time. =)
I just did. Bye bye Yahoo IM, Groups, Maps, etc. accounts. Too bad for them. Maybe if enough people leave over this, they'll change some policies. But if they don't, I'll just keep going about my business elsewhere.
I'm going to post this anonymously, as I'm an ex-AT&T employee. This possibly could be considered propreitary information, which would likely get me into DEEP shit.
Most "conversant" automated systems can be sped up to some extent. Try star or pound, one of them usually will get you right to a live operator or at least near the front of the queue.
It's not uncommon for AT&T to be over 100 people in queue at times.
Where the heck is the "Alert me when Yahoo! changes its Privacy Policy" option? No. Seriously.
Guess who'll be the last to set their P3P, too?
[insert witty comment here]
http://www.surfsites.net/optout
Well, you just think you know everything, don't you? I think you are gay. Hmmm...yes...that's right...a painter and decorator...a basketball player. A raving hommer! Now, where the hell are my beloved pony scratchings? One word of advice: keep this up and you'll be sent back t'dark place.
Yours with intense and satisfying boyish love,
Dave, the mystical chicken wing of San Sebastian.
Eee-orr! Donkey! Stop it Cecil, I'm going to come!
when I tried to email the list administrators, with an individual email to each but cc:d to abuse@yahoo.com, all but one of the emails were refused thus:
We are unable to process the message from <xxxxx@xxxxx.co.uk>
to <xxxxx-owner@yahoogroups.com>.
You may not cross-post a message to moderators of multiple groups
simultaneously. Your message to the moderator of the xxxxx
group was not delivered.
For further assistance, please email support@yahoogroups.com
or visit http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/groups/
So I tried removing the cc:, and that didn't work either. It seems that once you've emailed the owner of a group, Yahoo looks out for emails to other group owners, and blocks them. So I had to post to the lists instead, with an explanation and apology for posting to the group. Does that suck, or what?
Hey, you trusted a store on Yahoo that claimed to be 2600? You must not be reeeeel 31337 :-)
If for some reason, your browser or some other helpful software decides to resolve that to www.localhost.com , you'll get a helpful page explaining that your DNS configuration is probably not correct and pointing you to some common problems.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My hotmail account had some default birth year on it, like the 1997 that I got the account. When they put in the new law about protecting information for children under 13, they blocked my account until my parents gave permission for them to reactivate it, complete with documentation that those "parents" were over 13. Not wanting to give them real documentation, I decided that I could use another disposable account somewhere else instead.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yahoo pretty much has to start making some money
off this somehow, I was wondering all along how
they were able to offer the E-mail forwarding for
free. ^_^ The problem is they went too far the
other way and are now charging too much for E-mail
forwarding so it will backfire on them in a big
way. If they were charging $5 U.S. or maybe even
$10 U.S. per year for E-mail forwarding and
allowed me to pay them by PAYPAL or even a traditional check or money order through snail
mail I might have went for it. However since
they decided to make it $20 U.S. per year I have
instead opted to add E-mail forwarding to one of
the domain names that I already own (registered
through easydns.ca) for $20 CDN per year gets me
100 E-mail aliases for me and my freind's to use.
Then when I read on here that there was no way
other than a direct CC payment agreeing to let
them keep it on file and absolving them of any
screw ups they make with that CC info I realize
that would have killed it even if the price was
reasonable. Now that I've already upgrading my
domain to "DNS plus" service with EasyDNS it's
too late for Yahoo to get me back even though
they would have had the edge at a lower price
just because I'd been using their free service
all along.
BTW, anyone want a moonie.ca E-mail alias to
forward to your real E-mail address? I have
96 that I'm not using and would offer for a
very reasonable fee as long as you don't mind
an E-mail address that makes you look like a
cult member. ^_^
As for changing marketing preferences that was
just plain stupid. As I recall I checked no phone
solicitations because at the time I signed up for
yahoo E-mail I worked nights and I checked no mail
solicitations as it would save the sender money
to send the offers to me by E-mail and be just as
effective. So trashing that info was a good way
to waste money on Yahoo's part.
The most frustrating thing about Yahoo is that if
you find a broken link in their directory and you
eventually find where the site moved to there is
no way to let Yahoo know about this because they
won't take any updates from anybody other than
whoever submitted the link in the first place. *_*
If they keep that up long enough eventually their
entire directory will be broken links making it rather useless. -_-
Glen A. Pearce
glenap@moonie.ca
(BTW, I don't really intend to be annonymous, I'm
just too lazy to sign up for an account. ^_-)
You should contact your CC company. Often CCs have rules against vendors storing CC numbers for just such reasons.