Yahoo, what’s that?
“Off”, maybe?
I pay $10/month just to keep my Earthlink account that I’ve had for 20 years. Hell, I just got IMAP for God’s sake!
Ain’t nobody gonna blackmail me into accepting ads!
If they are using this on bundled-with-ISP accounts; I hope that they have some very, very, very displeased customers on the line.
If they are using it on signed-up-through-Yahoo; I’d be interested to know if Yahoo has done any updating of the Terms and Conditions to mention this, or is just rolling out the experiment. I don’t doubt that the T&C is written to absolve them of anything short of homicide(unless it’s a Chinese dissident, classy one there, Yahoo); but legalese doesn’t make bait-and-switch feel any less annoying.
In principle, I can’t argue with Yahoo’s right to configure their servers to be unhelpful to people who configure their browsers to be unhelpful; but I would be surprised if this works out well for them. Even if they are legally in the clear, “willing to hold your data hostage” is a giant black mark on any service provider; and Yahoo isn’t exactly a premium-tier user experience on the email side.
The least relevant email service just became less relevant.
Why don’t Dinosaurs go extinct any more?
How’d you manage that? One day I got notification that my Earthlink account was going to disappear, no options to keep it going at all.
Now you’re on “the list”…
No clue. I vaguely remember a special offer way back when. On the plus side I always have dial-up Internet service as a backup plan!
I still regularly receive email from @aol.com addresses.
My parents email you?
For you, maybe. It’s still the world’s third largest by a quick/lazy google search:
I actually see a lot of these emails because I sometimes deal with ESL students.
And if it isn’t a thing that way, the worry is if Yahoo can get away with it, what makes you so certain the #1, #2, #4-1000 providers won’t be lining up to try the same tactic.
And because XKCD is always relevant:
Maybe this will encourage more people not to use Yahoo’s mail service.
The fun part is $10 a month can buy you a small VPS somewhere with plenty of horsepower to run your own mail server. May not be able to keep the spooks from getting into my stuff, but I sure can prevent silicon valley from indexing it.
Something like that would have been a pipe dream 20 years ago.
I thought I had been fooled by paying $85 for a lifetime address through another provider 20 years ago.
This is true but smaller mail servers often get the block from bigger ones. If Verizon or whoever decides your little server is “not trustworthy because it doesn’t know you/isn’t big enough/once got a spam message from that IP in 1997”, good luck getting that big company’s customers (ie. your friends who are on it) to take your mail.
I once had a smaller provider who provided excellent service and good pricing. However, having legitimate mails bounced back to me was a regular enough occurrence to make it no longer worthwhile.
They have mail, apparently.
It’s time for a new generation of stealth ad-blockers that download the ads as normal but just don’t display them, so that there’s no way the server can tell an ad-blocker is in use.
But if I do that, where will I dump all my social media notifications so that I don’t have to see them?
