Slashdot Mirror
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."
I'm sure I'll be called a pocket socialist, but this sort of thing should be regulated. When you opt out there isn't anything that states it's temporary, and when you delete your account there's nothing that says it's not really deleted, only moved to a different bin. Yahoo is lying out it's butt and I for one would like to see some accountability.
Ok, rant off.
Children in the backseats don't cause accidents. Accidents in the back seats cause children.
Yahoo bought eGroups a while back, so those of us who are maintainers of mailing lists that used that free service are kinda stuck with them. There's really not an easier way to get a free mailing list setup that I've found.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
I like yahoo news. Unlike google news, it does not link to the webpage with the news on it. Instead it put's the text onto the news.yahoo.com domain. It makes for a consistant experience. It doesn't have a huge amount of sources but there are a decent selection of stories including an own page for opensource/linux stories and another for apple stories.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
Alright, I think I've had about enough. My first e-mail address was from usa.net, who was purchased by netaddress.com. I liked it because it was free, simple, and had pop access. When netaddress purchased it, and a few months later turned it into a pay service, I decided it was time to switch.
After some research, I found that Yahoo had the largest storage size AND pop access at the time. So, I hopped on and singed up.
And now here we are, a few years later. No more pop access, constant attempts to spam me - I think I've about exausted my patience after getting this e-mail from them this morning. So, I guess I'll do a mini Ask-Slashdot for all the peeps using Yahoo:
What E-mail Service do YOU use/recommend?
Or, alternatively, how much of a hastle would it be to just run my OWN mailserver? I've got a box I could do it on, but I'm worried that it'd be a pain keeping spammers from using it for outgoing if it was found (granted, I know nothing about running a mailserver).
Anyway, for myself and all those like me, suggestions?
The longer I'm a member of the Human Race, the more I believe Apocalypse is a valid solution.
Why does YAHOO! get such a bad rap from Slashdot? They run almost all of their services on FreeBSD and are a huge advocate, supporter, and patron of the FreeBSD foundation. Why does the majority of Slashdotters despise them?
I still receive spam from Yahoo under an account name I deleted several years ago. The email informs me that I may login under the userid listed in the email and change my preferences. When I go to login, it tells me that the account doesn't exist and asks if I would like to sign up under that name.
Since Yahoo spams tend to be more legitimate than the usual penis extension mailings, I find that I feel better after going to the advertisers website, making a list of all the email addresses, and writing to them to inform them that I will be signing up for free pencams, PDAs drawings, and porn-a-day lists.
Somehow I got around this by specifying my primary email address as 'noemail@nodomain.no'
It's never been an issue for me, thankfully..
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
You're saying because Yahoo! provides a free service that gives them the right to ignore the request to not receive spam from them? If this is the case, I am setting up a free webmail service. Of course you will have the ability to opt out of future communications, however, in the next few months I plan to change that and sell all your information so I can make a profit. Regardless if they keep the correspondence internal or if they sell your information to a third party, they are going against your wishes to be contacted.
alias dir='rm -rf
Which only works if you can remember what the account you might have is. I don't know which account I made the mistake of giving an honest email address for. I am pretty sure it is not the one I use these days.
The point is that I ONLY gave Yahoo! my email address because they promised not to spam me. Now they have BROKEN that promise.
If they lie to their customers they are probably lying to their accountants and shareholders as well. With hindsight it is pretty easy to see that the manipulation of the California energy market by Enron should have been a warning that maybe they were manipulating other things.
Jim Cramer has a note on his monitor, 'financial irregularities means sell'. I suggest folk add another 'Broken undertakings means sell'
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I think yahoo mail is great. I've never gotten an ounce of spam from them. Once a year or so I go check my marketing preferences. In fact, when I got that email, I found that all of my marketing preferences were still EXACTLY as I had left them - all "no". It's funny how people bitch about having to check marketing preferences so they don't get spam, but when those preferences aren't even offered, we hear nothing. Go sign up for a hotmail acct and see how much spam you get. Even when you turn off their "marketing preferences", you still get messages from them about once a month. Not to mention they don't have any spam filtering. Or a calendar. Or that nifty notepad.
Yahoo! blasts you with non-stop advertising while you use the service. I had to uninstall Flash in IE and get a flash blocker for Mozilla just to be able to use the damned site without distractions. But, that aside --
I use Yahoo! bill pay, which costs me $5/month. I use Yahoo! wallet with shop.yahoo.com for most of my online shopping so I've got all the carts in one place and all my order history in one place. Yahoo gets a cut out of every sale there as well (not to mention the monthly fees the stores pay). That's cold, hard cash they're earning -- not just ad impressions.
I just checked and my marketing prefs haven't been turned back on. If they are, it's good-bye Yahoo!. If the Yahoo! folks are reading this, I *strongly* suggest you think twice about bending your paying users over the table.
Then I noticed that my email address in the preferences was my "safe" address. The one where I never get spam. So I changed it to my "send all spam here" email and clicked save.
Then I went back to the first page ane guess what? All the "Send me spam" opt in choices were reset to YES again. Well that sux. I changed it back to NO NO NO NO NO NO NO and Fsck No! and clicked Save again. I hope it decided that No means No this time. But resetting to a default of YES when I changed something else seems pretty sleezy.
Regarding analyst's recomendations: Buy and sell only means buy and sell if you are an insider. For common shareholders, Buy means Sell and Sell means Buy. The reason they want you to buy, is 'cause they want to sell...
thats why i always use fake names and addresses when i sign up for stuff, boy do i feel sorry for the guy living at '123 Fake st. Springfield, Ill.'
Or you can just ignore it, move on with your life and don't complain about something that is free.
Let me introduce a new word into your vocabulary.
Apathy
ap-a-thy
noun.
1. Lack of interest or concern, especially regarding matters of general importance or appeal; indifference.
1. Lack of emotion or feeling; impassiveness.
Since when does "it was free" become an excuse for apathy and laziness?
Children are free.
Your argument is that just because we CAN ignore things, we should? Or should we actually show some backbone and not let entities make promises and contracts which they can break on a whim because people like you will just "move on with your life" anyways?
Apathy makes me sick.
-- "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Jean Jacques Rousseau
They are going to get sued. Many times. At $1000 per spam.
They may well have tested on SpamAssassin prior to sending the mail. They very likely *want* their mail to get caught by spam filters. That way, people don't see the mail, and therefore don't go and change all of the "Yes you can sell my personal info" flags off again.
I have accounts that have been dead for at least 4 years. My system is older than that, but I don't have logs of exactly when some of these guys got deleted before 2000. Yahoo has been mailing a bunch of my long-time dead accounts this week.
In the old days, I used to just shrug off the user unknown errors. In this modern age, those accounts are now all spam traps. Yahoo is getting their outgoing mail servers blocked from mailing me, and I don't have to lift a finger.
Just how many 5xx errors do they need to see?
I, on the other hand, was extremely pissed when they stopped the POP3. A couple of years ago, I went ahead and paid Yahoo! to register a domain name for my "premium service" personalized mail address. I even renewed it for a second year. When I received the "no more POP3" notice in my inbox, I assumed that didn't apply to me because I was already a premium user. Wrong! They still wanted to dip into my wallet a little deeper and charge extra for POP3. There's already enough vendor lock-in in the world. The last thing I need is another company trying to nickel & dime me (I get enough of that with my mobile phone bill).
What morons. Giving POP3 access away for free saves them server space and bandwidth, so the only explanation I can come up with is that they want more eyeballs on the ridiculously huge ads they embed in their webmail interface. Screw that. I have better things to do with my time than wade through Flash ads while I'm trying to read email.
I canceled the premium service, switched the domain away from Verisign (I'll tell you where you can shove your damn SiteFinder), and now Yahoo! doesn't get a single cent from me... EVER AGAIN. Now I can check my email via webmail, pop3, or imap4 and I have better virus and spam controls than Yahoo! ever offered (thank you Spamassassin).
I feel sorry for the non-geeks out there who put up with crap like this from the likes of Yahoo!, AOL, Microsoft etc. because they don't have the time or patience to investigate the alternatives.
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
At least Yahoo was nice enough to let you know when they're going to start spamming, and to remind you to check to make sure you've selected all 70001 of the "no" radio buttons. At least they didn't change their policy or your preferences without telling you.
Automatically killing anyone who sends you an e-mail mentioning "marketing communications" (insert other euphemisms for spam here) is probably not a good reflex. Some of them, like Yahoo!, might actually have some ethics.