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Yahoo Reminds Users That 'No' Doesn't Mean 'No'
rawg writes "Looks like Yahoo is resetting their 'Marketing Preferences' again. In an email I received from Yahoo today it states, 'Starting January 1, 2004, Yahoo! will begin to send you messages, via email or postal mail, about our own products and services. You can control the types of messages you receive by visiting your Marketing Preferences at any time'. It also states, 'And, as always, you can delete your Yahoo! account altogether at any time, for any reason, by going to the deletion page.' I deleted my Yahoo account a month ago. I guess they are lying, because I'm still getting their SPAM."
Dear Yahoo! Member,
Last year we announced changes that affect how we communicate with Yahoo! members about Yahoo!'s own products and services. However, we have not yet implemented those changes for all our registered members. Because of your previous account settings, Yahoo! has not yet sent you marketing communications under the new program. Before we do, we want to remind you how to set your preferences, and let you know what has changed and what is not changing.
Background Information
Over the years, we've sent emails to some registered Yahoo! members about Yahoo! products and services. We've also delivered promotional messages to Yahoo! members on behalf of our marketing partners. When you first registered with us and created your Yahoo! ID, our system presented a single "Yes" or "No" option for receiving all types of marketing communications. At some point you said "No," and after that we no longer sent any of these types of messages to you.
In March 2002, we began rolling out an updated marketing communications system. Instead of just a single "Yes" or "No" choice, we created a new Marketing Preferences page where you decide:
* whether you want to hear from Yahoo! about our own products and services, and separately, whether you want to hear from Yahoo! about the offerings of our marketing partners;
* whether you want to hear from Yahoo! about certain types of Yahoo! products and services but not others (For example, you can select specific categories such as "Managing personal finances" or "Using Yahoo! for research and surfing the Web," and de-select other categories that might not be of interest to you.);
* whether you want to hear from Yahoo! (or not) by postal mail or telephone, in addition to email.
When this updated system was first announced in March 2002, we told you we'd begin sending you messages about Yahoo! products and services across all categories, even though you had said "No" to messages under the old single choice system. We also told you that you could still say "No" to these messages by visiting your Marketing Preferences. But we did not completely implement this change until now.
What's Changing on January 1, 2004
Starting January 1, 2004, Yahoo! will begin to send you messages, via email or postal mail, about our own products and services. (We will not send you postal mail if you have given us a mailing address and have opted out of contact via postal delivery.) You can control the types of messages you receive by visiting your Marketing Preferences at any time.
What's Not Changing on January 1, 2004
As in the past, you will not be sent messages on behalf of our marketing partners. We will not call you on the telephone to market products or services. If you ever change your mind about any of these choices you can let us know by visiting and updating your Marketing Preferences at any time. Every marketing email you receive from Yahoo! will continue to include instructions for how to unsubscribe from more marketing email. And, as always, you can delete your Yahoo! account altogether at any time, for any reason, by going to the deletion page.
Please visit our Frequently Asked Questions page for more information. We look forward to serving you.
Sincerely,
Yahoo!
You can mark e-mail as Spam in Yahoo! e-mail. When you do that, you can create a filter or send the e-mail to Yahoo!. Will Yahoo! allow their own homemade spam to be treated the same way? What would happen if everyone sent the spam back to Yahoo!?
The email was a reminder to change your preferences if you don't want to be marketed to. When they changed them to yes (a year ago?) they didn't actually act on the change. Now that people have had a year to reset their preferences, they are going to start marketing.
Not that it doesn't suck, but the article header is wrong. They changed your preferences once, a long time ago.
I'll second that... I received the update notification yesterday, and I figured I'd have to go click a zillion "no" boxes to get everything straight again. I was pleasantly surprised to see that everything was still opted out. No complaints here!
Set your email prefs... I have mine as alerts-feedback@yahoo-inc.com - this way, they spam their own inbox...
Note that you will need to add the address as an "alternate email address" for it to be available in the selection box.
How may we contact you?
Please verify your contact information. It will only be used consistent with the Yahoo! Privacy Policy and your preferences. Please note that Yahoo!'s ability to accurately honor your choices above, including a preference not to receive certain types of communications, depends on up-to-date addresses and phone numbers in your Account Information. If your Account Information is no longer current, please edit or update using the links below.
Email - please select which address we should send email to:
alerts-feedback@yahoo-inc.com
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
They're not resetting your preferences, just reminding you to check them. And if you had checked them instead of running to Slashdot, you'd see that they're still the same. They just aren't going to start using those preferences until next year.
I'm not sure this is such a huge deal. What happened was back in March of 2002, Yahoo! created a whole new set of opt-out options with the intention of driving their marketing emails based off of those. The bad was, however, that they defaulted everyone to receive emails from every category. A scandal broke, please see: http://slashdot.org/articles/02/03/29/1833235.shtm l?tid=111 for more details on that scandal.
Yahoo apparantly decided they weren't going to start sending mail based on those new preferences for a while. They've decided recently, though, that that policy is going to change.
So anyone who did reset their preferences back in 2002 is safe. I know when I went in, my preferences were just the way I had them.
That said, its still odd that they defaulted everyone to 'yes'. And that shopping from a Yahoo! merchant will get your mailing address onto that form.
I get Yahoo's spam at a MindSpring email account.
Yahoo requires you to sign in to your Yahoo account in order to delete that account. Since I don't know what username or password or birthdate they have on file for me, it is impossible for me to sign in and impossible to cancel the spam or delete the account. It is also impossible to contact a live human at Yahoo regarding this problem.
The design is thoroughly irresponsible, yet they've had it this way for years.
1. Register a domain for $50 for a couple years.
2. Host it on Pair for $8/month including ssh access.
3. You now can securely check your email via SSH anywhere that you have a network connection. Since you own the domain, you don't have to worry about your email address changing two years down the road.
see, just by signing up with them, they have something they can monitize - my information.
Instead of saying, to be able to get free email, free gmaes, free claendars, music, ect you must allow for us to market to you, they think its ok to just change their word (word is SUPPOSED to be bond). But tell me that and don't tell me you wont sell my information and the DO IT!
I don't know about you, but I take it personally when someone tells me one thing and does another.
The message clearly states that the marketing messages start getting sent out on January 1st, but you can change your preferences *now*.
They aren't going to change the preferences to "Yes" on January 1st.
I'm on Yahoo and all my preferences are still set to "No". If I want to get any of those marketing messages that start on January 1st, I can change the preferences ahead of time, because I sure wouldn't want miss any of those oh-so-good informative messages!
Correct. I'm a paid POP3 subscriber on my yahoo account (a whopping $19.95/yr).
They have not messed with my marketing preferences so far.. I just checked them today.. all still set to "no" and no notice sent. We'll see if they reset only the preferences of free users or all users..
-Matt
I'm in the same situation from an account I created like 5 years ago. However, I found that if click on the account settings link, it takes you to a web page with an options that says something to the effect of "This account is not mine." I clicked on that, and the page said they would stop sending any mail to my address.
"Ask not for whom the bone bones. It bones for thee." --Bender
Wrong. I got one of these letters too, and I've never had an account there!
No. They just make you work for it.
I had this problem a long time ago. I would get a spam letter from Yahoo! with a link for removal. Of course you never click on those, but this is Yahoo, a more or less legitimate business. I found that clicking on the link and filling out the form or whatever didn't work. It didn't work the first time, and it didn't work the n-1th time.
That nth time came one day at work. I clicked the removal link, and something about the URL struck me as odd. It was so long ago, I unfortunately can't tell you what so you can do the same. But I changed that thing, and it went to *another*, different removal page.
This one worked. It actually worked.
The moral of the story is: look at that URL. Unless they changed the procedure since, of course. I wouldn't know, because I haven't gotten a message from them until this heads-up from the marketing department.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
This seems to work fine for me.
What's under yellowstone?
I'm a "free user", never paid Yahoo a cent, and they've never sent me a piece of spam.
Yep. I changed all my settings to "No" ("Hell No" wasn't an option) back when this was first announced, and when I checked after receiving this notice they were still set as I desired.
This appears to be a simple repeat of their first warning because they claim to be actually implementing some/all of the various options you say yes or no to.
I was already pissed back when I had to go change everything to "no", so I didn't bother getting pissed again for this reminder.
-- PondScum, SamThe
You are aware that Yahoo stopped the free POP3 service a couple of years ago, right? That's a $19.95/yr premium service now. And no, they didn't grandfather anyone in, because I used to use the POP3 service all the time (with a filter to autodel the required spam). I was disappointed (but not pissed, because it was free) when they stopped it.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
this is all the bulk servers yahoo uses to spam. Block em and you wont have to worry about their spammy crap again, but it wont block legit email from them.
66.218.73.32/27
216.136.172.244
216.136.172.247
66.218.69.17
66.218.69.14
216.136.172.246
216.136.173.191
66.218.69.16
66.218.69.27
66.218.69.21
216.136.172.243
216.136.172.241/28
66.218.69.5
66.218.69.2
mailer7.bulk.scd.yahoo.com
mailer4.bulk.scd.yahoo.com
mailer2.bulk.scd.yahoo.com
qmail1.bulk.yahoo.com
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
I've had problems with MyRealBox.net's uptime. Since they are a test server they will regularly take them down without notification and don't really bother to get everything back up and running fast. If mail is lost, oh well. I'd avoid them if you like getting your email on a regular basis.
On the upside, they are free.
--
RumorsDaily
Yahoo recently implemented DEAs (disposable email addresses) for their premium (paid) service. It's supposed to protect you from spam by allowing you to keep from giving out your personal email address. Who keeps Yahoo from sending you spam?
Yahoo is seemingly as bad as the rest, and maybe worse. Do they eat their own dogfood and promise to contact you only via the DEA that you give them? (I doubt it.)
Who are these people that think this is really what the customer wants? Yeah, yeah, I know...it's what they want that really counts: money.
I got an actual phone number.
Call Yahoo! at 408-349-3300 if you want to talk to a real person.
Since it's a toll call, I'm posting a partial map of the voice mail system.
Extension 2 for Yahoo! customer support, then option 2 for customer support. This will tell you to use the web page for free support. They don't want you to talk to a real person. Sub-option 5 (report abuse) tells you to send email, and does not let you talk to a real person. Sub-option 4 puts you on hold with a recorded message saying "Prodigy values your membership. Please hold for the next available agent." I've now been on hold for maybe 15 minutes with this... This is a bad option if it doesn't get you to the right person. I hung up and tried again... This time it worked.
They will not close an account for you. If someone has created an account which forwards to you, but you don't have all the personal information, there is nothing you can do. They don't care.
Also, they claim that this account was created in September of this year - actually, it wasn't, it was created a long time ago to sign up for a Yahoo! group, around 2001. So, they're recreating old accounts!
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I can recommend fastmail.fm - I found it via a /. comment, in fact. Web interface and IMAP access (working fine with Mac Mail), and a range of prices from free upwards. If you pay more, you get more space / functionality and access to the fastmail SMTP server, for ISP independence. I'll be paying for it soon, I'm sure. Since the goons at work implemented their 1/4-assed mail filter, it's been a godsend. The web interface is also nice and clean, and the whole thing has a nice white-hat feel to it. Check it out, anyway; I'll be recommending them when asked from now on.