Yahoo Mail Forcing Ads Through Adblock?

egNuKe asks: "Like some people here, I use Firefox and Adblock. I've blocked the ads that Yahoo puts in my inbox, however the next time I opened it, I've found other ads, and blocked them too. This happened for several times, until I figured out that Yahoo must have some script that checks if the ad is displayed and displays another one, if it hasn't. This is no big problem, I just needed to add several rules to Adblock to block the several ad sources they use. Here is the problem: when Adblock is running and effectively stopping Yahoo mail ads, Firefox would freeze (all open windows and tabs) for about 15 seconds. Then the page opens and there is no ads. The script must be on client side, since it's the browser that's freezing and not the network. Turning off Adblock solves the freezing problem. Is there a cure for this?" This is a touch-and-go issue as it basically boils down to the user's priority (not seeing ads) versus the services priority (displaying the ads it needs to allow the user to enjoy a free service). It was only a matter of time before someone thought to try and work around ad-blockers, and all this will eventually lead to is open warfare (competing Javascript or browser code in the browser) on your machine. Instead of working around the workaround, why not consider another service that doesn't inundate you with ads?

Comments

GReasemonkey

[AuMatar]

You could run a greasemonkey script to remove the script causing all this.

Re:GReasemonkey

[Arker]

I am using just noscript. Blocking scripts from yimg.com gets rid of the ads with no freeze-ups. It also, if memory serves, interfered with some function somewhere in mail, although the basics still seem to work. I normally let their ads run, as they aren't very intrusive. Then again I also use gmail for almost everything, and rarely login on yahoo anymore.

Opera

[TheDawgLives]

One trick that worked in Opera was to find out which javascript function was creating the adds and overwrite it. Opera allows you to define a user.js file and any functions in it overwrite the functions in any page loaded javascript. I just created a function with an empty body and I was good to go.

Why not allow it

[vga_init]

I hate ads just as much as anyone else. I certainly hate being subject to "driveby" ads where you happen to visit a web page once in your life for no important reason (ie check out a story linked to by Slashdot), and I would stop at nothing to block those bastards. Yahoo, however, is offering you a pretty valuable service (free web mail), and I assume you enjoy the benefits of having it, so why not let them have their ads? Quid pro quo is not too unfair in this case.

If you really want to get the ads off of your Yahoo mail account, pay them. I have a premium account with Yahoo because my ISP partners with them to provide all the web services. I log in--no ads! It's not too shabby.

Use the options

[dantal]

in addblock just click the radio for hide add instead of remove add, the add are still downloaded but you don't see them

Re:I just don't understand some of you

[novus ordo]

Adblock Plus has a whitelist so you can support the sites you like while blocking all others.

Re:View the ads or find another webmail

[Zwaxy]

You can use POP3 with gmail, and then you don't see any ads at all. I don't know if Yahoo supports POP3 or not, but even if it does I guess they still tag an ad on the end of each mail you send.

related to bug?

[lpq]

Sounds similar in "symptoms" (the freezing and the 15-20 second period) to this Firefox bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36684 9.

I take it that you can't reproduce the problem in IE or Opera?
What's they cpu usage? Does it freeze all firefox windows or just the Yahoo window?

Re:Dear Slashdot,

[The Mysterious X]

http://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/utos/utos-173 .html

It's in section 2.

Filterset.G suckage explained

[pestie]

I used to run Adblock with Filterset.G, but I had a number of problems with this setup:

• Filterset.G didn't include some rules for major sites, like MySpace.
  
• Because of that, I added many of my own blocking rules, which promptly got overwritten every time Filterset.G updated.
  
• The guy who created Filterset.G is an egotistical whiner who didn't like his "hard work" being copied without attribution, so he became a prick about his "licensing terms." This has nothing to do with how well Filterset.G works, but annoys me personally.
  

So I switched to Adblock Plus, which:

• Allows me to subscribe to a non-Filterset.G rule set, which seems to work a whole lot more effectively than Filterset.G ever did.
  
• Allows me to block DOM elements as well as the usual URL patterns, which is incredibly useful for blocking ads on certain sites.
  
• Allows me to create my own rules that aren't overwritten when the subscribed rule list updates.
  

Adblock Plus rocks. There's just no comparison.

Only for proxies

[pestie]

Only ad-blockers that works as proxies have that issue (Privoxy, for example). Firefox extensions and the like handle HTTPS just fine.

Re:I just don't understand some of you

[LunaticTippy]

The "reasoning" these ad-people use is that ads you are forced to watch, against your will, will somehow corrupt your free will. That your unconscious mind will be screaming "Ford! Coke! Gap! Etc!" every time you try to think clearly about making a purchase. Maybe it's even true. I find myself wanting to punch the monkey from time to time, and a free iPod seems compelling to me. I haven't seen an internet ad in a long time, either!

So, don't waste your time trying to be reasonable. It's all some kind of marketing voodoo that isn't bound by logic.

Re:View the ads or find another webmail

[Zwaxy]

I used to use the web interface. It really is a joy to use. Then one day about 6 months ago I found I couldn't log in. It's almost impossible to get any useful information from Google when you experience a problem. For over 2 weeks I couldn't access any of my old email at all. Then as if by magic it started working again.

That was when I stopped trusting 3rd parties to hold my information for me. Now I use POP3. The interface might not be so pretty, but at least I know I can access my mail when I want to.

Of course, I could use the web interface for reading and composing mail and use POP3 just for backing it up to local storage.

Re:Gmail

[freakxx]

oh no...anyone can sign up the gmail now...invite is not a need anymore :-)

Re:View the ads or find another webmail

[rm69990]

Yahoo! is offering free POP access on new accounts on at least yahoo.ca. I know, because I need a temporary e-mail address, and made one on yahoo. I was pleased to see it offers POP access, so I don't need to use their horridly slow interfaces.

Re:Gmail

[MrNormS]

Gmail has contextual ads beside the email. The "ticker-like item" is customizable to display whatever you want. Though gmail will continue to add the odd ad in there, you can simply disable the whole thing in settings. The contextual ads are there they are non-intrusive and they are not forcing the "ticker-like item" ones on you. I get the point though, free services have ads. Gmail's just happen to be way less intrusive than the other competitors services.

Re:Gmail

[Barny]

Actually, Gmail cellphone activation works here in Australia :)

Touch and no go.

[billcopc]

TANSTAAFL! Yahoo has ads. Slashdot has ads. Just about every site on the net has ads. If you want email without ads, you can pay a real email hosting company that will provide you with POP3/IMAP/SMTP access for a fee. Heck you can even get that from Yahoo, I think it's 30$ a year or so.. if you had been looking at their ads you would know ;)

But if you want something for free, you have to pay with your eyeballs. Someone has to foot the bill for the web hosting, and the sysadmins, and the time and effort that go into building a site. Or are you one of those guys who gets HBO for free, spliced off your neighbor's cable ?

The ad blocking game is no different from copy-protection schemes, or product activation, or any other undesirable software trait. They're like human viruses; they start out as a minor nuisance (simple banner ads), then you develop antibodies (adblock), then the virus grows stronger (javascript detection), then come stronger antibodies (adblock++.Net 2.0 GT), and then finally the virus grows so strong and belligerant it just plain kills you (ad company buys out Mozilla and makes you watch 2-minute full-screen noisy ads every time you click, then forces you to complete a "short" survey before letting you read the actual page).

I personally don't employ any kind of ad blocking.. yes, it slows down page loads a little bit, but I don't mind it so much. An extra second or two won't kill me, I'm usually multitasking anyways. The sight of ads doesn't bug me, I just scroll past.. every now and then I'll actually see one that catches my interest and click through, because sometimes I actually discover something I like. The only gimmick I use against ads is FlashMute, because the last thing I need is for the neighbors to call the cops on me, from hearing those stupid screaming smilies pumped through my loud stereo.

Yahoo = riding pure inertia

[Pausanias]

Sarcasm well taken, but it seriously is amazing how little Yahoo has bothered to evolve since, oh, about 1999. I can bear text ads but I cannot stand graphical ones. I started using adblock on Yahoo (with my own rules) as soon as it came out (was it around 2002?). And that was with phenomenal success---I blocked all incoming ads with about 15 minutes worth of detective work. Back then I figured it'd only be a few months till they figure it out; and then they will somehow block the blocking. Guess what, five years later I'm still blocking all their ads. Not that I visit their site that often anymore---GMail is my default mail account now.

Here's a few reasons why noone should use Yahoo as their mail system:

• Messages dated to the year 2038 appear in my Inbox rather than getting filtered to Bulk Mail. Huh? Isn't date filtering the most obvious filtering you can do? Turns out you have to pay $20/yr for their "best" Spam filter.
• You still have to pay $20/yr for POP access. GMail is free.
• You get 1GB of space, and have to pay $20/yr for 2. GMail has almost 3GB for free.
• Graphical and flash ads are plentiful in Yahoo mail. You have to pay $20/yr to rid yourself of them. GMail has text ads only.

Don't even get me started on GMail vs. Yahoo maps. Or GCal vs. Yahoo Calendar. Yahoo are not innovating; they are riding the pure inertia of their 1996 early start.

Oh, here's a word for those of you who are moaning about unethical users blocking ads: some of us are truly incapable of tuning out obnoxious banners and flash animations. It realy ruins our internet experience. Don't worry. The sheep will always be there to provide you with advertising revenue. As for the rest of us, if you want to win us over, use text ads only. You will get many more clicks from us, that's for sure.

But Apple says Yahoo mail is the best and they even included it on their new phone. Everyone knows Jobs wouldn't lead us astray.

Re:Yahoo = riding pure inertia

[enosys]

I have an account with Yahoo Canada. A few months ago I was able to enable POP3 access if I agreed to receive some spam. However, they did not support encryption and so I felt that was useless. I just checked and I was able to activate POP3 access without agreeing to receive any spam, and SSL is supported both for POP3 and SMTP. Sure, Yahoo is just trying to catch up to Google, but I think they're doing fairly well. I sent a message using SMTP and they didn't even append the stupid ad at the bottom.

Just one warning regarding POP3: It was originally disabled and the option for enabling it is a set of radio buttons which allow you to choose between web+POP3 and forwarding. There doesn't seem to be any way to disable POP3 once the selection has been made.

Why even bother? No need to!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why even bother with any of this? There's countless posts right now suggesting ways around a problem, but no one's said anything about the claimed problem either. The thing is, the summary seems to be ENTIRELY WRONG!

I've been using yahoo mail as my primary email for like 10 years (can't be bothered to move to gmail or anything). I've never had such problems. Actually, I'm logged in right now, using FF and Adblock (non-plus) and Filterset.G. Guess what? No ads, no extra ads I've been fored to block, and never froze either. I see no such ads-forcing client JS either (I've looked). I can't believe anyone didn't mention this yet... And yes, I've also tried their new mail beta thingy (which DOES suck very badly, and takes even longer than gmail or google maps to load)

I don't know if the submitter is on crack, plain lying, imagining these problems (recreational drugs?), are being caused by something else (other buggy extension), spyware, or if it's some kind of tactic to try to get ppl to switch away from yahoo mail to other services (conspiracy theory of the day!)...

I don't know how this could even make the front page really (yeah, I must be new here, right?)

The only reason I can see myself switching from yahoo mail isn't ads (I don't see any), it's their new beta mail piece of shit thing. Force this slow and bloated useless trash on me, and I'm over to gmail SAME DAY and NEVER COMING BACK! There better be an option to keep the "classic" mail app. All I want is a fast loading, lightweight and simple page (click to view inbox, click on message to view, hit reply, etc) - NOT some javascript bloated useless thing (drag this and that? WTF for?) that takes a minute to load. If I wanted a very slow and feature-rich client, I'd be using outlook, not webmail. Thinking of it, outlook opens faster.

Re:Gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

From Gmail's terms of service: "Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems."

On Yahoo, under their Datastorage section, states "Please note that any information that we have copied may remain in back-up storage for some period of time after your deletion request. This may be the case even though no information about your account remains in our active user databases."

I assume that means mail as well, though it's not stated specifically as far as I can tell. Let's be reasonable. As cheap as magnetic storage is, there's a reason that spam and trash bins are automatically cleared after a period of time, and there's a reason that email services have mailbox size limits. No free email service is in a position to permanently store every email sent to or by every user. The cost of that storage would far outweigh whatever benefit they get from being able to retrieve that dirty joke you sent your old college buddy 4 years ago.

Re:Gmail

[42forty-two42]

They've even updated it since then with more specificity: "You may organize or delete your messages through your Gmail account or terminate your account through the Google Account section of Gmail settings. Such deletions or terminations will take immediate effect in your account view. Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems."