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Yahoo Changes Protocol, Blocks Third Party Clients
NaDrew writes "ZDNet reports that Yahoo is once again blocking connections from Trillian (the alternative multi-protocol client). Yahoo tried this a few times last year and it looks like they're trying again. Cerulean, maker of Trillian, employs some excellent protocol engineers, who I have no doubt will quickly figure out Yahoo's latest obfuscation and release a patch. A quick fix discovered late this evening: Change your Y!IM host from scs.msg.yahoo.com to scs.yahoo.com, port 5050, and it should work. This is on Trillian 0.74H, not Pro."
Centericq is also broken. I'd be happy to use an official Yahoo! IM client...if they had one that was console-based.
Yeah, blocking people from chatting with their protocol will help anything.
I think it blocks gaim also.
Help! I'm being repressed!
The quick fix to changing the server to scs.yahoo.com, port 5050 does not work for most people, and does not work with Miranda IM, GAIM, or other third party IM clients besides Trillian.
It appears to be a separate server, and you won't be able to communicate with other people on the 'fixed' yahoo servers.
Brielle
nope!
As a paying Trillian subscriber, I am disappointed in both Yahoo and Trillian. I figured that they had their differences settled last fall when similar stuff went on. I guess I assumed that Trillian was on a good working relationship with the people at Yahoo. I am up for renewal for my Trillian membership and am going to re-evaluate that purchase if this continues.
Oh, wait...
Haven't been able to connect to Yahoo via Kopete since the block.
While the Open-source people here usually have a hard time comprehending why someone like yahoo would do this, consider the following. Ad revenue from y! Instant Messenger: $$$ As revenue from user connected to trillian: 0 Of course yahoo understands that their client may not be the best out there, yet without any additional ad revenues it makes it tough to explain to upper management that it is worth allowing any old client to connect.
I could dig up the older comments/articles which thoroughly contradict this troll-ish article summary but I don't think it deserves my time.
Yahoo did not, I repeat did *not* try to "block" third party IM clients "several times last year". *All* they did was upgrade their protocol for better reliability/etc (I have personally noticed the increase in reliability/refresh rate etc). It is up to the 3rd party developers to upgrade their protocols if Yahoo decides to do so.
And Yahoo did offer to help them fix their stack to help it work with their servers. I am not affiliated to Yahoo, btw - I just think it receives a lot more undeserved flak then it should.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Isn't it possible that they simply made a protocol change? Clearly they have every right to do that. They simply don't care about trillian customers, probably feeling they should do whatever they think is necessary to support their own service and their own customers.
While it might be nice of them to support trillian as well, that just makes it more difficult to maintain their own service. Don't assume that their change was made maliciously just to irritate trillian users.
In short, scs.yahoo.com:5050 is no good.
I've been using Trillian for about 2 years now and think it's a great application. However, there's a reason Yahoo never gave users the ability to send out a mass-message to everyone on your contact list. When programs such as Trillian start including this feature, the potential for abuse is fairly obvious.
AIM has tried this in the past too, they even went back and forth with Cerulean for about two weeks constantly changing they way the AIM service connects. Finally they gave up and Trillian has worked perfectly even since. You think Yahoo would learn... However, I'm sure Yahoo is not changing thier protocal just to make Trillian not work, probably some underlying security issue we arn't seeing.
Well, does anyone know if this is just a protocol upgrade or if yahoo! is really trying to get rid of the third party clients?
If they want to get rid of 3rd party clients, then this is just another arms race, meaning we will eventually have open clients that work, after some finite delay.
In all honesty I can't blame yahoo! for trying. After all, for each person that doesn't see the ads associated with their official client, they lose revenue.
Yahoo! is a great site and they provide a LOT of stuff for free, so I don't blame them for trying to get some money back for all the free stuff they have given us over the years. I guess since IMing is so popular and so much time is spent in the IM client, to them that's a LOT of missing eyeballs over a long period of time that don't get to see the ads. That's a lot of money lost by the minute. And let's face it.. we are using their computers for free, and not giving anything back each time we use a third party client.
My question though, is that if they hate third party IM clients for cutting into their rev. stream, why don't they take the law out of their own hands and use the law to their advantage? Is there nothing that could be done, by drafting some clever EULA or something, that would make it illegal or something like that to use 3rd party clients? That might actually dampen the efforts with libyahoo and other projects that try to develop an open protocol lib. Sourceforge might even cease to host such projects, being that they are in the realm of piracy or accorting to the DMCA.
While it would suck for me (as I love to use centericq over their stupid client), why don't they just make it illegal to use third party clients?
So why not switch to an alternate IM system altogether? *cough*jabber*cough*
If they're going to be such babies about letting *more* people use their system, let 'em. They're pretty much second fiddle to AIM, it seems...
well, it's nothing one behind the ear wouldn't cure
For the same reason the tech community comes out with patches for holes in programs, why we come out with virus protection, etc.... To try and stop people from doing what we do not want them to do. It may not be permenant, but it will work
Now my question, didn't the gov't come out with a law a while ago forcing AOL to share their IM standards so third party software could integrate with it? And if so, wouldn't this apply to all IM software, including Yahoo?
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
I was using GAIM on Yahoo just last night - not sure if it's still working today.
Don't log out.
First, I haven't disconnected from Yahoo in over a week, so I can't say if CONNECTING works. However, I can vouch that chat works in GAIM if you connected before the changeover. So the problem, if there is one, likely stems from session initiation.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Because strangely enough Yahoo as a company would like to make a profit. They provide some excellent free services to users and are heavily reliant on advertising revenue from these to generate income to fund their operations. Yes the adds can be be a tad annoying but I get a very good email and IM service for free so I am not going to complain. 3rd party clients cut out a potential source of revenue for Yahoo so while there is money involved for them they will always bother.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
In an era where instant messaging is touting as the "next big thing", most service providers are always faced with the dilemma of whether to allow third party clients to connect, or prevent.
Messaging clients with advertisement-based model will surely object to allowing third party clients to connect, since it doesnt make any business sense.
Furthermore, they may have allowed such third party clients in the past, to gain that critical mass that ensures market peneration and continued usage, but once they are past the bell curve, they would then clam down on it.
Think of it as an equivalent to Microsoft clamping down on piracy - they never prevented that in the past knowing that so long as its their products being used, they will be able to generate revenues one way or the other. Now that the market penetration is coming to a saturation (or if not, there are far more alternative solutions available than ever before), they have started to really put on the squeeze.
Finally, companies like trillian may well have the best protocol engineers in the world, but such disruptions in service shall push away customers every time, however small the percentage might be. Unless connectivity to widely used messengers is provided by agreement, such connectivity outages will cause most users to move to move away from them.
http://efil.blogspot.com/
Of course, the best solution is to create a superior protocol and set of clients, get it standardized, and somehow get them widely adopted (yeah, I know, this is the hard part), and make it so that Yahoo and MSN want their messengers to be compatible with IT.
I know this is pie in the sky, but this whole messenger war seems so stupid. Wasn't someone working on a standards for a messenger protocol? This whole messenger war thing seems so stupid and only serves to piss users off.
This is ind of like copy protection and DRM. They keep trying to stop people and people just keep getting around it. Nobody ever seems to learn. Are they just going to keep beating their heads against the wall until the end of time? Are all these guys that clueless and stubborn?
Who blames them? When they decide to upgrade their product and add new features to their protocol, do you really expect them to test for backwards compatibility with all the unsupported 3rd party IM clients!? They never provided an API/protocol spec. They never provided developer support to 3rd parties. They have *no obligation* to maintain compatiblity and they clearly won't and shouldn't let backwards compatibility interfere with new features in their own clients. Damn tin foil hats.
Is this article supposed to make Yahoo look evil? If so, I don't see how. I know the popular notion on /. that "information wants to be free", but Yahoo provides a free service, and as with a free service, you are at the mercy of the provider. So Yahoo wants you to use their official client, it isn't the end of the world, nor do I think it is even newsworthy here on /. I am prepared for the inevitable karma loss on this comment, but I have been maxed out for years, it does not bother me anymore.
I hate sigs.
Wouldn't this be Jabber?
It's already there, open source, many servers, and intercommunication possible between multiple servers.
And some people have made proxies for jabber-commerical messenger systems communication.
And it works with many, many clients, console-based as well as graphical...
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
A fine theory, except there is an official Linux/BSD Yahoo Messenger client available.
I have no idea how good it is as I use GAIM.
Depends on what time you connected. I have a couple friends that use that as well, and they couldn't connect after 6pm PDT (that's when the change went into effect, IIRC).
All I want is a kind word, a warm bed and unlimited power.
Come on, people. Yahoo is upgrading its protocol to prevent message spam. The changes temporarily prevent gaim, Trillian, and other clients from working until they make their own changes. This isn't a sinister act on Yahoo's part and the poster (and ZDnet) have nothing to stand on to say this is about blocking third-party clients.
And to those complaining about the yahoo client, I find it to be the best IM program overall. The new version has a clean interface, quick access to your address book and other features, but is customizable to not show any of that stuff if you don't want the clutter. Best of all, it doesn't deliver ads. NONE. Plus the offline messaging is a great feature.
Perhaps the people complaining haven't used it for a year or two and just think it's awful that a commercial company would break compatibility for an upgrade? It happens all the time in the open source world - cut Yahoo some slack.
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
Makes you just itch for a google client doesn't it?
'Cause if it's Google it must be good!
GMail - like turning on the lights and watching the cockaroaches scatter!
I would rather be ashes than dust!
Everyone keeps talking about how Yahoo wants to profit from the ads in it's Y! Messenger Software. What Ads? Unless you look at the other screens [you known the non-chat ones] you will not see any other ads
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but I take Yahoo at their word that they are changing the protocol for security reasons. I typically use Gaim to connect to AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. I use Gaim for Yahoo just because I don't like extra processes running on my Linux machine when they don't need to be. The Yahoo client for Linux doesn't have ads. AFAIK, there's no way to make money off a free client and free service when there's not a single place to carry an ad.
I have heard (but don't know because I've never used Trillian) that Trillian has "broadcast" features that sends messages to a list of users. I believe that Yahoo is trying to block clients that have this type of feature and clients, such as Gaim, that happen to share protocol libraries or access methods with these clients are "collateral damage".
Perhaps if Trillian wanted to have a good working relationship with the service providers, they would not make it so easy to abuse the services in the first place -- IMHO.
later,
tims
"Ahhhh, best laid plans of mice and men... and Cookie Monster." -- Cookie Monster, Sesame Street
"Make it so, Number 1"
I can see the Yahoo engineers trying it now.
I understand that there are valid reasons for not using the Yahoo client like unsupported OS's or "it sucks" - whatever. In the end, you are using their service for free and they aren't obligated to give you a damn thing. They could fold their tents tomorrow and wouldn't owe anyone but their creditors and customers (those who pay for services).
Why doesn't some enterprising person create a P2P chat client? I was going to go on a rant about how if someone wanted to have a totally free IM client, they could buy the servers to host connections, pay for bandwidth, etc.. but the P2P chat may be better in the long run. Granted, that doesn't solve the problem connecting to Yahoo (or the like) but it's a good start, right?
Reviews with a twist! http://www.sardonicbastard.com
As others have mentioned, the revenue from advertising is very likely the primary motivation for making sure that people use the Yahoo! client instead of some other. Also note that in boosting email storage to 2GB for subscribers to premium Yahoo! services, Yahoo! also removed the online ads for those users. Well, those lost ads have to be made up for somewhere. So I guess their just tightening things up a bit.
Just for completeness, it is possible that they have technical reasons for changing the protocol too. Maybe the new one is more secure or runs better on their servers, yadda yadda. But without further comment from Yahoo!, I'm going with revenue enhancement.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
"3rd party clients cut out a potential source of revenue for Yahoo"
Actually, 3rd party clients are the ONLY way they receive revenue from some of us. I keep a Yahoo and Hotmail email account. I rarely IM anyone outside of AIM. Trillian's checking of Yahoo email drives me to their site (where I see their ads). No checking, I don't go as often to check my mail. They lose money. As far as I'm concerned, Yahoo is shooting themselves in the foot.
Now my question, didn't the gov't come out with a law a while ago forcing AOL to share their IM standards so third party software could integrate with it? And if so, wouldn't this apply to all IM software, including Yahoo?
Yes, and yes. AOL had restrictions placed on IM i January 2001, but they were lifted in Aug. 2003 because that decision had largely rendered them unable to compete in the video conferencing scene that MSN and Yahoo had built up.
A good article summarizing this seems to be this one.
NOW, note that Yahoo! is cozy with the DSL and telephone service provider SBC. Given the news that SBC is laying fiber for residential DSL, your question is completely relevant.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Says TFA:
"This time, however, Yahoo said it will continue changing its protocols to prevent clients such as Trillian from finding new ways to incorporate Yahoo."
So it's obvious that clients like Gaim, Kopete and Trillian need to come up with a scheme to keep up. It would seem prudent to have a feature that detects a failure to connect, asks the user if he would like to update the Yahoo protocol plugin, and if yes, downloads and installs it automatically, and then connects successfully. It just takes some manpower to keep the plugins up to date, but this would be coordinated by a cross-client task force that would share information on the latest protocol changes.
Of course, one can wonder if all this is really worth it. One day the whole world will be on Jabber (except we will rarely call it Jabber since it's so ubiquitous), and we will tell tales to our children of those days when we couldn't necessarily communicate with other IM users since there were competing (!) systems, and IM communication companies spent resources on trying to prevent communication. And they'll smile politely and think "old age has caught up with gramps." (and then they'll fly home in their cars, but that's another story)
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Once yahoo makes an encrypted version of the YIM protocol, they can sue the makers of Trillian for DMCA violations.
Even without the DMCA they may be able to bring a case against them if Yahoo's TOS prohibits 3rd party clients.
You should really enlighten yourself. Jabber is a unique, distributed, open IM network with an elegant, extensible and easy-to-understand protocol. You can run your own server and have it talk to the rest of the Jabber network almost like email works. Jabber is really lightyears ahead of any of the "popular" networks today (which is not really "networks", but one or a few servers). Jabber is my only IM network, and I use it to keep in touch with my geekier friends. All the non-geek friends are still on MSN, where they are obliviously happy, but why would I want to IM with them? ;)
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
I've been a Trillian user since its inception. I donated via paypal to cerulean back in the day when you got a personal reply from their founders, and back before it was obligatory (to get the pro version). I use it for the same reason I use Linix, Open Office, and GIMP - because I'm not locked into a company's adware and (incorrectly or not) feel like I get more choice in how I use these apps. Of course, if everyone gave the finger to all closed IM protocols and used Jabber, we'd never have these problems.
When I look back, I remember ICQ being the king of IM. Nowadays, I barely know anyone who still uses it. MSN Messenger took most of the users from them. Now, how did they do that? ICQ had an incredibly large audience, but when masses shifted, lot of other (even geek) people did too. They didn't drive their users away, it was only that another service proved more useful... because it had more people to talk to, and that was because it was more appealing to less tech-savvy audiences...
So, what can we learn from that? For me, that more users, even when they don't use an "official" client, will eventually mean a wider adoption, thus more people will finish up using the official client anyway, even if there are also more people who don't.
Perhaps the mailbox space race will eventually reflect itself in the big competitors IM services... I wouldn't be surprised if google's next big thing is a IM app. Did we need another free email service? Probably not. But people shift, and people seem to be liking gmail. What kind of mess would we get if we get yet another IM? Why can't we all just get along?
It is sad that IM isn't seen as a series of interconnected networks (like email...) :(
Are there any open IM protocols? I noticed that Trillian now supports IRC, which makes sense so long as your friends all use the same server as you. Are there any IETF working groups for this? It can't be all that complicated to do. Maybe even piggy-back on some existing P2P system so that no one has to bear the expense of a central server?
The Trillian guys have fixed it. You can grab the patches(Trillian Pro 2.013 & Trillian Basic Patch I) from the Trillian download page.
My official Yahoo! client doesn't have any ads at all. As such, they aren't losing any advertising revenue from me using a 3rd party client. All they're doing is confusing me because last night when I tried to connect, it rejected my login.
Really, I've never had ads when using their official client. There isn't even a little space for them to show up. Do most people see ads or are we just assuming that that's the reason they're doing this?
That's why I run GAIM, plus its open source.
Directions located at http://gaim.sourceforge.net/downloads.php
Goddamn, that makes me feel geeky.
You make a good point re: their advertising based revenue model and all that, but here on Linux, like everyone else , I prefer to use an all-in-one client (in my case , Gaim). So while my IM client of choice is restricted (not going to stir the pot , already well mixed in the posts above, and say "blocked"), I will use the free Yahoo Messenger client.
Which , while driving traffic to their sites via news and other links, does not send any ads directly via the IM client.
I don't know if you're on Windows, but i am, and i find that Gaim (for Windows) is a pretty poor client. I mean, it's OK, but compared to other things, it needs a lot of work. It seems to me like the Windows version of Gaim was nothing more than an after-thought. I can't get work done (I'm paid to sit around instant-messaging my friends all day -- true story.) using an after-thought. ;_;
So... i use Miranda. Needs a lot of work also, but it's much better off than Gaim, i find, and it's just as open.
What kind of problems do you experience with GAIM? The only thing I can think of is the Video/Voice/File sharing with MSN and AIM, but I never use those anyways.
That by itself is enough to make it the clear leader for corporate use. I set up a server for our office LAN and our IT guy installed Psi on every employee's desktop. Now we have a private, low-latency communication system for passing short messages back and forth in real-time. There hasn't been a single problem with the roll-out; I started the server, spent 20 minutes telling the other employees how to use Psi, and walked away from it.
With any other IM service, we'd have to deal with privacy policies (such as mandatory encryption of all messages) or other hassles. With Jabber, we can freely send sensitive information between employees without worrying about outside snooping. Beyond that, we wrote an notification API for use with our internal applications that allows you to send event notices to selected employees via either email or Jabber. It's nice to get instant notification of system status changes without depending on our Internet connection being available.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Jabber is the only free, open IM standard that's in relatively wide use and there're lots of clients available for it - I personally use Psi. I've switched long ago and haven't looked back.
:) Of course, the Yahoo transport is most likely broken too, but I don't know anyone that uses Yahoo IM, so I don't care.
I often chat with friends that still uses MSN and ICQ through Jabber's transports or whatever it is they call them
Many of my fellow posters have suggested that the solution is for people to switch to Jabber. I agree that the solution should start with Jabber, but it's not as easy as asking everyone to please switch.
I'm going to try to identify the obstacles to a migration to open standards, and I hope that others will expand on this and maybe even offer some solutions.
How do you convince ISPs to begin deploying Jabber servers as they would deploy mail servers? Is there any money to be made in deploying and operating a worldwide network of Jabber servers? If so, maybe some entrepreneur could come up with a clever idea for bootstrapping the network.
As some people have mentioned, it is possible that IM may evolve interoperability naturally, but I wouldn't count on that happening anytime soon. The final weapon of the proprietary IM providers will be to add crypto authentication to the protocol, with a key embedded into the clients. They would then have a solid legal recourse (DMCA) against "rogue" clients seeking interoperability. (Who knows, though... that could be a useful selling point for open standards!)
There... now that I've identified the problems, all that's left is for someone to provide the solutions. ;)
Cerulean Studios just released Patch I which fixed Yahoo connectivity. You can download it from here: http://www.trillian.cc/support/20040624.php I just installed it and it seems to work fine.
I bet Google steps in to make chat a better experience. They'll figure out a way to make it profitable without being annoying... while remaining open. (crosses fingers) Or maybe I'm dreaming because I just got a gmail account and it *is* a better webmail experience.
Same with me, I wouldn't mind using Gaim on windows, but last time I tried it (maybe 5 months ago?), it crashed whenever I tweaked certain prefs. I tried working around it for awhile, but eventually got fed up and went back to miranda.
Maybe I'll give it another go one of these days, it was nice using the same client in windows and linux.
I have the Gimp 2.0.4 on Windows using GTK+ 2.4.1 and it works fantastically. The problem is not with GTK+.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
But these companies spend millions of dollars on their networks for the hardware and software that is part of it. Let them play a little add here and there to help support it.
All these ad blockers and ways of getting around their revenue streams only make them try and make more annoying advertising.
If trillian wanted to be a good friend to yahoo, they'd pass through their advertising as well or find some other way to compensate them. Just because Yahoo decides to offer their network services for free doesn't mean anyone else can deploy software that uses it as well. It's like having someone write a robot to suck the content off your website, chagnge a few slogans and graphics and publish it on their site as their own minus your advertising.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
I got pro v2.0.
I'm still connected to Y!, I looked and it's set to scs.yahoo.com:5050 (default).
so the story is not 100% true? I'm just lucky?
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
The commercial linux client they have doesn't work either, so they've, as far as I can tell, completely locked out all non-windows/Mac clients. Which may be a small amount, but when my company asked me to look for an IM client I went elsewhere because of their lackluster linux support.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Blah, blah, blah about Gaim et al, let's get to the important stuff: What the hell kinda job do you have, man?
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
I only ever use MSN, Yahoo & ICQ. I hate bloat ware and advertisements.
Under Linux I use GAIM - it does everything I want it to (except list Yahoo chat rooms). I have yet to explore getting my new WebCam working.
However under Windows, I use Miranda. (It doesn't require GTK). It is a very small program, uses very little memory, and has the features I need (except browsing/entering Yahoo chat rooms). Miranda rocks - it is a subtle program, but has awesome features and many plugins. If I want to use my WebCam - I have to run the Official Yahoo & MSN clients. They are overloaded with fretures that I never use and ads that I never want to see.
If I was super organised, I would take my Miranda drictory to/from work everyday on my USB 128MB stick - to keep the DB & plugins up2date.
No adds in both programs is a huge plus. Full priase for the efforts of these OSS programs!
Mike
They're not out to break other IM clients. That would be easy, and the various protocol changes they make are minor. They're simply reengineering their own network, and not taking the time to warn Cerulean, because they view them in a bad light.
Look, all Yahoo! did was change what servers were handling what traffic. Historically they do that once every six months, presumably as a load balancing issue (the server list keeps widening and coming from a larger geographic area each time.) Trillian had a patch out in under 12 hours because the change was exceedingly minor.
Yahoo! is not breaking remote clients. They're working on a service they provide, and sometimes other people's emulation of said service just needs to be upgraded to keep up with developments in Yahoo!. Quit with the nefarious tone.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
A lot of people are whinging they have no choice, and if they us the AIM/MSN etc. clients they, they must watch the adds blah blah blah. My question to them is, why should they give you a free service simply because you want one - I'm really getting tired of seeing this constant gimme gimme argument by Internet users who simply don't want to pay for anything? It costs money to host and support these things and add revenue is one of the ways they do it. As much as I like freedom of choice of client and I can understand why they would be pissed and muight they sokmething like this. Personally, if I found no one was receiving my revenue generating adds I'd tell the lot of them to fuck off and shut the thing down. It is a business after all and not a social charity.
Google wants to make money, and they'll figure out a way to make money off IM if they decide to launch an IM service. Gmail uses text ads based on the content of your mail. Why couldn't it use text ads based on IM conversations? A Web based IM client (which would be neat, because everyone has a Web browser anyway) could easily do this.
Google might even merge Gmail and GM (Google Messaging), and let you archive your conversation in the same way you archive your mail, and they can serve ads based on that, too.
In fact, IM, e-mail and newsgroups are very similar - they are all forms of messaging/communication. You could use one interface and merge everything into an über messaging service, which would probably include Google Groups 2 or a later GG (Google Groups) version adapted for this purpose.
In fact, they could probably make everything look like it's the same thing (which it would be, really), and just let the user decide whether he wants to talk to one person or a group of people. If the person on the other end happens to be available right there and then, you would have realtime discussions (IM). If not, you'd probably get a message from him/her later (mail). Or you would get messages from groups of people (newsgroups/Google Groups 2).
Come to think of it, I think it is just a matter of time before something like this happens...
Clever signature text goes here.