7 ms·

Guys... let's just delete our Yahoo accounts. That company can't go bankrupt fast enough. It will sell our data for quarters.

by mkhpalm 10y ago

JustSomeNobody 10y ago
But that's where all my junk mail goes...
- intopieces 10y ago
  I recently decided that if I don't trust the company not to send me spam, I don't need to avail myself of their services. It might not be possible for everyone, but it's made my life a lot simpler.
  - manarth 10y ago
    I don't trust any company to not send me spam. Even if they don't do it today, they may get bought-out, hacked, or otherwise lose control of the data. Even if everything suggests that they won't spam me, I'm not entirely convinced. Even if they're the most upstanding company on the planet, I'm still not convinced. Based on past experience, you understand.
    - intopieces 10y ago
      Well, I still have a spam filter algorithm. But I'm overall done balancing multiple personal email accounts because of the liability involved. If it gets hacked (and it's one I don't ever check), will I notice? It seems unwise to have extra email accounts open, potentially with my personal data and associated with my identity online. It's also a matter of attention: I have a limited amount of it, and tracking multiple email accounts and managing a spam account isn't worthy of it.
camus2 10y ago
Is it possible to extract all emails+contacts from yahoo without paying ? furthermore my paypal account is linked to yahoo.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  Yes, you need to scrape their webpages. 10 years ago when I pulled everything from my Yahoo acct, there were several choices of open source scripts which could do it.
  - newscracker 10y ago
    No, it's no longer necessary to resort to scraping the webmail pages. You can easily setup a client like Mozilla Thunderbird for IMAP with Yahoo and get all your mails and folders on to it for free. I have done this recently and it has been working. Only the ad-free webmail from Yahoo is a paid option.
- brightsize 10y ago
  You could use an IMAP client such as Thunderbird to copy your mail away from these clowns to another service that supports IMAP. Fastmail has an IMAP-based bulk importer that in my experience works well. I used it to hoover all of my mail out of GApps and into my FM account.
- newscracker 10y ago
  Download Mozilla Thunderbird, setup a new account with your Yahoo credentials and it will auto-configure it for IMAP. This does not require any payment. I did it recently and am still using it. You need to setup folder synchronization for offline downloads of all the messages and folders you have on your account.
noxToken 10y ago
You're right, but it goes beyond that. Yahoo used to be a titan. I was a regular user of Yahooligans back in the day. Yahoo (at one time) had been my go to search engine. I can't say that it was ever my primary email account, but I used it. I used Yahoo Messenger. I was part of a community that centered around some Yahoo games. Yahoo used to be a titan that was a direct Google competitor in the realms of communication, search, news and entertainment. Sure, I can delete an account for any service belonging to any company(!) if I want. But when you use a service, there's an explicit level of trust that they'll protect your information to the best of their ability. We assume that we can use their services as our primary driver without worrying about MD5 hashes without salt. We assume that they'll take more security procedures than a student making a toy app testing boundaries in a 400-level course. Sure, we can delete our account, but this is an unnerving situation. It's not like Yahoo was thought to be some back alley operation where everyone nervously awaited news like this. Yahoo was a direct competitor and contender to some of the biggest digital companies on the Web. This level of incompetence is mind blowing. At least it is to me.
- aidenn0 10y ago
  Yahoo was my primary (as in only one not provided by my isp or school) e-mail address from when they bought Geocities until the early '00s. I've been disentangling as many services from them as possible over the past couple of years.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  This goes into the much bigger issues of there not being enough search engines. Back in the day if you couldn't find something, there was Lycos, Hotbot, AltaVista, MSN .. each had their own indexes (or they purchased access to a few major indexes). Later we saw people ditch their indexes and just using a few big players. Now we have Google, Yandex ..and...Bing? DuckDuckGo uses a combination of Yandex and others, Microsoft has been found parsing Google to build their index ... I want more options, but the search space barrier to entry is very high.
ggregoire 10y ago
Honest question: why did you need a Yahoo account?
- LeoPanthera 10y ago
  There are many, many active communities and mailing lists still using Yahoo Groups.
  - manarth 10y ago
    And to clarify, some Yahoo Groups require a Yahoo account to participate. You cannot participate with a regular email address, you must sign up to a Yahoo account. If you join a real-world social gathering which happens to use such a Yahoo group, you may find yourself excluded from online communication with that social network unless you agree to sign up to Yahoo.
cm2187 10y ago
But I'm afraid I have no sympathy for outraged users. No more than if it was gmail or hotmail. They didn't pay for the service, they got an email service for free. It's hard to complain when it is free. And they did enter into an agreement where they sell their privacy against a free service.
- ramses0 10y ago
  Knock-Knock... I pay for Y!Mail Plus. It's not just free users wanting a drop-box for spam.
  - cm2187 10y ago
    I actually wasn't aware there was also a paid service. Though I doubt this is a large share of the 1B accounts.
    - WillPostForFood 10y ago
      I'm sure you are right that it is a low percentage, but I bet there are a lot. When I used Yahoo, I paid, as did my wife. For the extra storage, no ads, and I could be misremembering, but I think paying got you access to imap or pop3, which wasn't generally available before the iPhone.
GoToRO 10y ago
How about... let's leave it alone? If you don't like it, don't use it. I like it.

Guys... let's just delete our Yahoo accounts. That company can't go bankrupt fast enough. It will sell our data for quarters.

by mkhpalm 10y ago

Guys... let's just delete our Yahoo accounts. That company can't go bankrupt fast enough. It will sell our data for quarters.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

But that's where all my junk mail goes...

intopieces 10y ago
I recently decided that if I don't trust the company not to send me spam, I don't need to avail myself of their services. It might not be possible for everyone, but it's made my life a lot simpler.
- manarth 10y ago
  I don't trust any company to not send me spam. Even if they don't do it today, they may get bought-out, hacked, or otherwise lose control of the data. Even if everything suggests that they won't spam me, I'm not entirely convinced. Even if they're the most upstanding company on the planet, I'm still not convinced. Based on past experience, you understand.
  - intopieces 10y ago
    Well, I still have a spam filter algorithm. But I'm overall done balancing multiple personal email accounts because of the liability involved. If it gets hacked (and it's one I don't ever check), will I notice? It seems unwise to have extra email accounts open, potentially with my personal data and associated with my identity online. It's also a matter of attention: I have a limited amount of it, and tracking multiple email accounts and managing a spam account isn't worthy of it.

camus2 10y ago

Is it possible to extract all emails+contacts from yahoo without paying ? furthermore my paypal account is linked to yahoo.

jacobolus 10y ago
Yes, you need to scrape their webpages. 10 years ago when I pulled everything from my Yahoo acct, there were several choices of open source scripts which could do it.
- newscracker 10y ago
  No, it's no longer necessary to resort to scraping the webmail pages. You can easily setup a client like Mozilla Thunderbird for IMAP with Yahoo and get all your mails and folders on to it for free. I have done this recently and it has been working. Only the ad-free webmail from Yahoo is a paid option.
brightsize 10y ago
You could use an IMAP client such as Thunderbird to copy your mail away from these clowns to another service that supports IMAP. Fastmail has an IMAP-based bulk importer that in my experience works well. I used it to hoover all of my mail out of GApps and into my FM account.
newscracker 10y ago
Download Mozilla Thunderbird, setup a new account with your Yahoo credentials and it will auto-configure it for IMAP. This does not require any payment. I did it recently and am still using it. You need to setup folder synchronization for offline downloads of all the messages and folders you have on your account.

noxToken 10y ago

You're right, but it goes beyond that. Yahoo used to be a titan. I was a regular user of Yahooligans back in the day. Yahoo (at one time) had been my go to search engine. I can't say that it was ever my primary email account, but I used it. I used Yahoo Messenger. I was part of a community that centered around some Yahoo games. Yahoo used to be a titan that was a direct Google competitor in the realms of communication, search, news and entertainment. Sure, I can delete an account for any service belonging to any company(!) if I want. But when you use a service, there's an explicit level of trust that they'll protect your information to the best of their ability. We assume that we can use their services as our primary driver without worrying about MD5 hashes without salt. We assume that they'll take more security procedures than a student making a toy app testing boundaries in a 400-level course. Sure, we can delete our account, but this is an unnerving situation. It's not like Yahoo was thought to be some back alley operation where everyone nervously awaited news like this. Yahoo was a direct competitor and contender to some of the biggest digital companies on the Web. This level of incompetence is mind blowing. At least it is to me.

aidenn0 10y ago
Yahoo was my primary (as in only one not provided by my isp or school) e-mail address from when they bought Geocities until the early '00s. I've been disentangling as many services from them as possible over the past couple of years.
djsumdog 10y ago
This goes into the much bigger issues of there not being enough search engines. Back in the day if you couldn't find something, there was Lycos, Hotbot, AltaVista, MSN .. each had their own indexes (or they purchased access to a few major indexes). Later we saw people ditch their indexes and just using a few big players. Now we have Google, Yandex ..and...Bing? DuckDuckGo uses a combination of Yandex and others, Microsoft has been found parsing Google to build their index ... I want more options, but the search space barrier to entry is very high.

ggregoire 10y ago

Honest question: why did you need a Yahoo account?

LeoPanthera 10y ago
There are many, many active communities and mailing lists still using Yahoo Groups.
- manarth 10y ago
  And to clarify, some Yahoo Groups require a Yahoo account to participate. You cannot participate with a regular email address, you must sign up to a Yahoo account. If you join a real-world social gathering which happens to use such a Yahoo group, you may find yourself excluded from online communication with that social network unless you agree to sign up to Yahoo.

cm2187 10y ago

But I'm afraid I have no sympathy for outraged users. No more than if it was gmail or hotmail. They didn't pay for the service, they got an email service for free. It's hard to complain when it is free. And they did enter into an agreement where they sell their privacy against a free service.

ramses0 10y ago
Knock-Knock... I pay for Y!Mail Plus. It's not just free users wanting a drop-box for spam.
- cm2187 10y ago
  I actually wasn't aware there was also a paid service. Though I doubt this is a large share of the 1B accounts.
  - WillPostForFood 10y ago
    I'm sure you are right that it is a low percentage, but I bet there are a lot. When I used Yahoo, I paid, as did my wife. For the extra storage, no ads, and I could be misremembering, but I think paying got you access to imap or pop3, which wasn't generally available before the iPhone.

GoToRO 10y ago

How about... let's leave it alone? If you don't like it, don't use it. I like it.