posted
I ran out of room in my 6 megabyte e-mail account some time ago, so I doled out $10 for the sake of not needing to delete everything every week for the rest of the year -- and just this past weekend, I was running out of room in the newly 10 megabyte account. All of a sudden, a little past midnight last night, I log in and my account's boasting 2 GIGABYTES. My current ten megabytes registers as 0% of the storage space, which, oddly enough, makes me feel really lonely. But damn. Go Yahoo go.
From an e-mail they sent me:
quote:Dear Yahoo! Mail Extra Storage Subscriber,
Thanks for being a loyal Yahoo! Mail user. We're writing to inform you that Yahoo! is now offering a new version of Yahoo! Mail Plus, featuring 2GB of email storage. In light of this change, we are no longer offering Yahoo! Mail Extra Storage as a standalone product.
Here's what this means for you:
First, for the remainder of your current billing cycle, your Extra Storage service has been expanded to include all the benefits of Yahoo! Mail Plus at no additional cost to you. Those benefits include:
Virus scanning and cleaning provided by Norton AntiVirus™*
SpamGuard Plus, a personalized spam filtering system
No graphical ads
No promotional taglines in messages you send
Total message size of 10MB, including attachments
2GB of email storage
Second, because you're a valued Yahoo! Mail subscriber, after your current billing cycle ends, we will give you another year of Yahoo! Mail Plus (a $19.99 value) for $9.99 – the price you're currently paying for Yahoo! Mail Extra Storage.
Hot damn. I may switch to G-Mail soon anyway -- I doubt I'll ever use up a single gigabyte alone, and I have a new address all picked out -- but I'm glad to see Yahoo's making itself really freaking competitive. I wonder what it now offers for free accounts...?
Posts: 3293 | Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
Not only that (I have a mailplus account and a free one), but the regular free Yahoo accounts were just upgraded to 100 MB storage and 10 MB attachments.
My server space (the front door, anyway) for my website is through geocities (which is part of yahoo), so my email address for my madowl domain go through yahoo mail.
posted
Heck yah! I have an ancient yahoo account from about 10 years ago and they upgraded that account a few months ago as a "reward" for being such a long term user. My other account got upgraded today too! Yay!
Posts: 4953 | Registered: Jan 2004
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posted
So, Tom, what would you recommend for a person who wants to access the same email account from multiple locations on a daily basis?
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
I don't even use my free Yahoo account (that I have), but I figure it won't be long before hotmail follows suit. This is kind of like gas wars at gas stations across the street from each other. Since gmail went live, they are all getting nervous.
posted
Is Yahoo even working? It took so long to load the page I just closed the window. I was going to work on a turn today and everything (or was I?)
And I use web based mail so I have a place to get cluttered up with adds and newsgroups that isn't one of my real addresses.
Posts: 3243 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
You could also use IMAP, of course. Heck, you could probably get by with an Exchange client and OWA, if you really wanted.
In my experience, though, web hosts are more likely to provide POP servers than IMAP or Exchange servers. *laugh*
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Where I work, POP and IMAP is blocked by the firewall and PDAs and laptops are restricted. And, as it turns out, I do run my own webmail server. It looked like you were shuddering at webmail in general, though, not just at Yahoo mail.
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
My for pay webmail (fastmail.fm) uses only IMAP, gives me basic file sharing, allows me to alias folders as email addresses (creating instant filters), decent spam filtering, and yes, a web interface to do most of this (I use thunderbird for basic at home mail chaecking, but there's a lot of special functionality that isn't in a general use app like thunderbird).
And yes, I have a Yahoo! webmail account. It was my out-of-college general account up until 2 years ago when I got the current one; I keep the Yahoo! as catch-all for spam, some newsletter type stuff, fantasy baseball, and there are a few people who still use it as their primary contact for me.
posted
I happen to like using my Yahoo accounts. They are convenient, and I don't really get that much spam. So I join those who are happy about the upgrades.
And, just for the record, Yahoo isn't any slower today than it usually is for me.
[ June 15, 2004, 02:41 PM: Message edited by: Ela ]
Posts: 5771 | Registered: Nov 2000
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posted
my ISP offers webmail access - I can access it and read what I want, then when I access at home, anything I haven't deleted goes there.
Posts: 2034 | Registered: Apr 2004
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posted
I keep my old Yahoo address around for e-mail lists and the occasional spam. (My decrepit Hotmail account fields most of the spam.) I also use YahooPOPs so I can check it without going into the webmail interface.
Posts: 1592 | Registered: Jan 2001
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posted
Those of you that are experiencing problems with Yahoo today, it is due to DNS problems with the Akamai services.
Posts: 2102 | Registered: Dec 2000
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posted
Another big advantage of having a webmail address is that it makes it easy to remember. Your friends more likely to get mail to tomdavidson@yahoo.com than to tomdavidson@podunklocalserver.net Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
Webmail is a nice tool to have in your belt, but could never ever be a primary way to use email. Google has more features than most webmail hosts, but comparing it to Outlook2k4 or something is just laughable.
What's funny is that yesterday, before the official announcement of their service upgrade, I got this email:
quote:You are currently exceeding your Yahoo! Mail storage quota by a very large amount. You are only allowed -2048.0MB of storage but you are currently using 0.0MB of storage. Your account has been temporarily disabled from receiving new messages.
posted
Hmmm... Has this happened to anyone else ? My (last) yahoo account is from last year only, so it had 4MB storage space. And now it jumped to 100MB. But a friend of mine whose account is from 2002 wasn't given the same treat...
Not that I'm complaining myself Posts: 4519 | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
It's not working for me!!! It worked for a little while, just enough time to show me my 23 messages from Twinky's RPG before it started showing me the white screen of death. Posts: 4089 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
(for those who don't know, this is Suneun on my laptop/cluster account)
Tom, my main (and secret) e-mail address is accessible to me through ssh to the "techhouse" server on Brown's campus and your-favorite-linux-mail-reader (pine, mutt, mail, elm). It's a great solution for a relatively clean inbox. It does require ssh capability on whatever machine I'm on, but there's a java applet on techhouse that connects to the server automatically. Not really something for everyone, though. Besides needing a linux server to host your e-mail, yah need to be comfortable with CLI.
My brown account is, unfortunately, HIGHLY krufty. We're talking about 60 spam e-mails a day. I try to only check that on my home computer, which has a fairly robust spam filter on it. When I have to, I check it using webmail and spend way too much time manually deleting the spam. Definitely not an ideal solution.
Posts: 1261 | Registered: Apr 2004
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They reason they give you so much room is because they READ ALL OUR EMAIL for "marketing" reasons! Don't use G-Mail if you write any personal letters.
Posts: 4953 | Registered: Jan 2004
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posted
(1) There is tons of software in place already that "intelligently" reads email. How do you think Bayesian spam filters work? And if you think Norton doesn't have just as big an incentive to collect marketing info...
(2) Unless you use encryption, email packets can be sniffed by anyone. This has been true since Fidonet.
(3) Who cares? The written word was invented to communicate, not hide.
Posts: 1839 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Telp, the way GMail works as I understand it, isn't mailicious at all. Google found that the number two activity on the internet was searching, and number one was e-mail. They decided they wanted a piece of it, so they created GMail. The idea of the 1GB storage and special everything is to make it more attractive than other e-mail sources.
When you recieve, and open a message, an automated google script will run that searches that message, and then displays ads (clearly marked and on the side) that are relevant to the content. The information is not reported back to Google or stored, or used against you.
quote:Who cares? The written word was invented to communicate, not hide
Very ture... But what if they do a search for political views... what if you get turned down for jobs because of those views... etc...
Posts: 4953 | Registered: Jan 2004
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posted
(1) It's their right. I don't post legalese disclaimers below my forum posts.
(2) The logs of their snooping would be just as public as my essays, and might make for interesting publication.
Posts: 1839 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Yeah, I got the same pleasant surprise when I opened up Yahoo! mail yesterday... I was using 87% of my inbox, and now I'm using 5%! I LOVE it. I'm so excited! Posts: 7877 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
I am very uncomfortable that a massive bureaucracy can track my every move and thought. It's way different than a spouse or friend or all of your family knowing what you are and what you do and like. I don't want these people knowing what I think and want and do. It's none of their business, because I say it, or whoever wants to say it. I'd say it's ok to have the option for people to be more private, but I'm uncomfortable with this kind of tracking power even existing. But it does.
I am also ill at ease especially because massive bureaucracies can so easily be turned against the people. How difficult would it be for a government to claim this information from a company? What happens if a dictator had this power? What happens if suddenly being what you are or what you believe becomes a crime overnight? You are laid bare and cannot escape.
I prefer anonymity when it comes to government/corporate tracking. Posts: 4953 | Registered: Jan 2004
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posted
uh, google isn't a massive bureaucracy. And their ad software reads your email in the same way that anti-spam software reads your email -- passively, and without permanent recollection except in aggregate.
Why should you trust them? for the same reason you have to trust any email provider (and really, every email relay). Nothing stops them from reading your mail but circumspection.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
Hey... they've got hundres of employees and red tape and computers for infrastructure.... sounds like a bureaucracy to me.
But actually I'm more worried about the real bureaucracies using the information collected by Google and others.
Posts: 4953 | Registered: Jan 2004
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Or you prefer companies like spam assasin or spam guard to "know" all about you, as opposed to Google, who, while not perfect (Google "Google" and "China" sometime), is still better than most.
posted
Google collects NO info, or at least they don't admit it. At the time the email is opened/received, a software program reads the scripts and applies their advertising program to it... Exactly like what happens when you do a Google search and the ads appear on the right side of the screen.
EDIT: In other words, there isn't some repository at Google that has your email address mapped to a bunch of keywords, based on all the emails you've written through GMail... Heck, it'd probably be a lot more effective if Google just dod that through their normal search mechanism; just map the computer that you searched from to all the search terms you've ever entered, with another cross-referencing to all the sites you clicked based on those searches. It's not technically impossible to do this today.
posted
So we've created a culture that the only way to interact with it means we must submit to scrutiny of everything we do and are. Great... *sigh*
Posts: 4953 | Registered: Jan 2004
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posted
Telp, here's an interesting excerpt on why this sort of thing may NOT be bad, as unintuitive as it seems. I haven't bought into it yet, but it raises some interesting POV.
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