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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.
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
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 <-
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."
If you buy something from a vendor that uses Yahoo (its not always obvious), Yahoo goes ahead and saves your addresses and phones "so you don't have to type it in again." Gee, thanks. The time saved can be spent recycling all the paper junk mail I'll be getting.
I found both my home and work addresses AND phone numbers! I quickly deleted them, but as security conscious as I am, I had no idea Yahoo was saving that stuff away for future marketing "opportunities".
Please everyone go check!
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?
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 guess this is thier last chance to screw you before they have to stop using the "its a free service" excuse.
Free service? Not POP/SMTP access or forwarding of Yahoo! Mail... I've been quietly abandoning my (previously useful) Yahoo accounts. I suppose they remain useful, but not at $20/year. Call me Scottish, but for only twice that, I can register another domain and have thousands more e-mail addresses.
At 09:42 PM 3/20/2002 -0800, Yahoo wrote:
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.*
Sign up today and SAVE 33%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.
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.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
[...] 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.
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.
I already tried to set my alternate email address to abuse@yahoo, marketing@yahoo, and sales@yahoo - won't take any of them.
There are plenty of sites that offer free email addresses and would be happy to forward to one of those.
There are entire blocks of email addresses that were created for this. Basically any example domain (example.com, example.net, etc...) is defined as being nonexistent to be used in tcp/ip documentation as examples. something@example.com goes nowhere, doesn't consume anyone's bandwidth, and pretty much no one filters for it.
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).
root@127.0.0.1 is not a valid address. Sending email to such address usually gives some error like unrouteable mail domain "127.0.0.1" because there's no MX record in DNS for 1.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa (but I'm not sure if it would work even if there was such record, I'm too lazy to test it). Use root@[127.0.0.1] if you want email to literal ip address bypassing the standard MX resolving (see RFC 822). But the mail server can be configured to reject them, and e.g. my server will give you this error: root@[127.0.0.1] domain literals not allowed.
So the root@localhost is probably the the best choice (but it still sometimes may not work as you expect, if the "localhost" is not set as local domain of SMTP server). But remember that even when you make them spam local root mailbox, it's usually their own account, not the one of their ISP.
When I have to ever register with working email I make alias like spam-from-yahoo.com@my.domain so I always know who sends spam and I can always deactivate such alias. But I have yet to see anyone selling my spam-from-their.domain@my.domain address to anyone.
If you can't easily edit /etc/aliases on
your mail server
(and if you're not your own
postmaster, it's usually true)
check out
spamgourmet self-destructing disposable email addresses:
I don't use it because I have my own mail server and I can do whatever I want (or whatever I can) with my mail address, but spamgourmet seems to be great if you just have one mailbox somewhere like most of the people.
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$