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."
After 15 years of marriage I am well aware of "No means No" !
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!
Amusingly enough, though, SpamAssassin filtered it out and it ended up in my spam folder.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
If you don't like it, let them know and take your money somewhere else. If you're not paying for it, then you don't have anything to complain about.
Life in Orange County
Yahoo ignores my preference to not get spammed by them, I ignore all software EULA's that I click through... I think it's a fair trade... :)
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
The default preferences assume that you want to receive spam. But I'm not complaining, because it is a free service.
Internet portal Yahoo may want to think about changing its advertising slogan from "Do You Yahoo?" to "You DO Yahoo."
More like "Yahoo DO You."
'Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes, aaarrrrrrrr!' -- Minsc
I'm going back to using the telegraph and smoke signals.
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.
Ok, rant off.
Children in the backseats don't cause accidents. Accidents in the back seats cause children.
no really we KNOW you want to say yes, wait you said no??? huh I cant here you it sounded like yes. whats that? you said no you would love to have our spa.. er I mean emails sent to you well you asked for it....
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I mind the paper. Even though it's easy enough to throw it in the recycle bin and wash my guilty conscience of it, I'd still feel better if it were never created in the first place.
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
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?
Peoples Mums and Dads,
Peoples Aunts and Uncles,
Clueless PHB's and Office Clerks.
Loads of people use it, that much is obvious there are other people in the world apart from clever techies like you and me!
Anyhow your message was clearly flamebait and I took it hook, line and sinker!
nick .
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
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
Then we kill the marketers.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I have enough crapmail I receive at my house, I don't need more. When I visited the marketing preferences page and told them no for a second time, this is what I was returned
Thank you, your changes have been saved. Please allow approximately 5 days for this change to take effect.
Why would it take 5 days to remove me from a friggin mailing list? A simple delete query should remove me from the database immediately.
alias dir='rm -rf
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.
girl that everybody liked. But she told you "No" and you wondered if "No" really meant "Yes" afterall.
But her parents had to call your parents to clarify that "No" really meant "No" for really positive for sure.
It's like that.
Maybe it was just me.....
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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.
For free, you get:
All of this for 0 USD a month, and now they're suggesting that they may "clear" your nospam preferences, unless you turn it back on again.
How is this evil? I've had a Yahoo profile since 1997, its been invaluable. Heck, I feel guilty not paying them a dime!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
It's all bullshit. They only have to sell your name once in order to start recieving spam and junk. Note to the clue impaired: They "sell" your name when you create the account, before you say no to spam and junk.
1) This one wasn't spam - this was Yahoo letting you know that they're finally going to act on their spam policy that they told us about a year ago. You agreed to them sending you service announcements in the EULA when you first signed up - thus, while you can happily block their domains, there isn't really anything you can do about them sending you this email.
2) If you had bothered to click on the link in the email, you'd find (as I did) that when you opted-out a year ago, they haven't changed anything: you're still opted-out. I fully expect to not receive anything further from them.
-T
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 agree with you. Even though it takes more effort to throw out a credit card offer than delete an email, the fact that they had to pay around $0.30 to send it in paper and bulk mailing costs makes me not mind. Bulk email, which approaches free, has entirely different economics which makes it much more insidious by my perspective.
However, I don't feel the same about telephone solicitations. They've always outraged me, even though there is a cost involved. Before DNC was implemented, I encouraged everyone to keep phone solicitors on the line as long as possible without purchasing anything. I hoped that the ratio of per call cost to hit rate could be increased sufficiently to make the process no longer worthwhile. Others advocated this also, but it never seemed to catch on.
The Wired article linked to is from 2002. Maybe they're finally going to start spamming/calling/junkmailing people after giving them almost two years' notice. I think that's awfully nice of them.
I just checked and everything I clicked "No" on back in 2002 is still there. I think the headline is wrong and misleading. I've never gotten any spam from them both before and after I set my preferences.
I actually love getting all the credit card applications. They, along with any other spam snail mail which includes a "no postage necessary" envelope, are a convient way to recycle. I strip off any identification marks on the ads which may let them trace to my address and stuff them full of all the other garbage that comes to my address and send it back to them. If I could find thin lead bars to fit in the envelope, that would be more fun but at least this way my recycling bin is nearly empty.
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.
Or you can just ignore it, move on with your life and don't complain about something that is free.
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!
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
Putting linux on a girl's computer without her consent is a bad rap for the open source movement. Educate her, yes, but forcing her to switch after she said no is bad karma.
Wait... we're talking about linux, right?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
If you don't like it, let them know and take your money somewhere else. If you're not paying for it, then you don't have anything to complain about.
Bullshit. Zero cost does not give someone license to behave in a despicable manner. If someone offered a free cleaning service for your home or office and then used their access to rape your spouse, you would be perfectly in your rights to complain bitterly and have them arrested (hell, if you catch them in the act, you have the right to shoot them dead in most states, and rightly so). If someone offered a free food service and fed you bad food that put you in the hospital, you could bring them up on charges of violating safe food laws, and sue for civil damages.
Someone offering a free web service or free email service does not entitle them to no complaints when they use that service to abuse their customers. SPAM, by any sensible definition, is abuse, and while it may not be as abusive as, say, rape or contaminated food, it is abuse nevertheless.
What is really appalling is how Yahoo abuses the resources of others. This isn't SPAM going to yahoo mailboxes exclusively (or even mostly), it is SPAM going to everyone who ever used their online clubs, whoever browsed a web page they required one to register for (clubs, etc.) even in passing...most of whome pay for email service, storage, and bandwidth elsewhere, only to have it abused by Yahoo (and, of course, other similiar low lifes peddling Penis extentions, Viagra, child pornography, and bulk mailing software).
Worse, most of these people signed up and made their preferences known, and were offered the "service" under those conditions and that understanding. Yahoo is once again, retroactively, changing their side of the bargain, and doing so at the financial expense of the recipients.
They deserve to be treated no differently than any other spammer, free service or no.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
There are a lot of things that mean "No" in a marriage...
10. "No,"
9. "Maybe,"
8. "I have a headache,"
7. "It's that time of the month,"
6. "It's your turn to change diapers,"
5. "My mother's coming to the house tomorrow,"
4. "Did you take out the trash?,"
3. "I just want to cuddle,"
2. "Could you give me a backrub?,"
1. "Yeah, that's what we need, another kid,"
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
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.
I got that email Wednesday... completely forgot about it! Anyway, this is what they just told me after changing my marketing prefs:
"Thank you, your changes have been saved. Please allow approximately 5 days for this change to take effect."
That must be a very slow database they use....
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?
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...
At the end of the email they sent me, it read:
:-)
"... This is a service email related to your use of Yahoo!. This email was sent to ___@xxx.xxx for the Yahoo! ID ___. If this ID doesn't belong to you, click here."
So I clicked on the link provided and they now think they have the wrong person and will never bother me again.
-- Boycott Shell
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.
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!
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/
Personally, I always use horror movie villians for website registration. Although I can't help but worry that maybe Freddy Krueger wouldn't have killed all those people if he wasn't getting all my SPAM and junk mail
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.