quote:

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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.

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quote:

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New to Yahoo!?

Get a free Yahoo! Mail account – it's a breeze to stay connected and manage your busy life.

• 100MB of email storageKeep more of what's important to you
• Powerful spam protection
  Read only the mail you really want
• Get your mail anywhere
  All you need is a web connection.

(More info here)

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Damn, go Yahoo! Hope this works out for them -- I don't like Google's growing soon-to-be monopoly on the Internet's resources.

[edited to fix UBB code]

[ June 15, 2004, 01:10 PM: Message edited by: Lalo ]
 

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Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
 
This is great!

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.

NICE. Actual space.
 

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Posted by Corwin (Member # 5705) on :
 
Computer Lie#1: You'll never use all the disk space.
 

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Posted by Telperion the Silver (Member # 6074) on :
 
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!
 

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Posted by Scott R (Member # 567) on :
 
Yes, but now Yahoo is so mind-numbingly slow. . .
 

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Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
*shudders again* I had no idea it was so widespread, here at Hatrack....
 

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Posted by saxon75 (Member # 4589) on :
 
So, Tom, what would you recommend for a person who wants to access the same email account from multiple locations on a daily basis?
 

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Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
 
Magic.
 

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Posted by Scott R (Member # 567) on :
 
That would be--

*E*mail.

The E is for ELITIST.


 

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Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
"So, Tom, what would you recommend for a person who wants to access the same email account from multiple locations on a daily basis?"

POPmail and a PDA. But if you can't get the PDA, you can either host your own webmail server or, in a pinch, use www.mail2web.com


 

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Posted by Farmgirl (Member # 5567) on :
 
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.

Farmgirl
 

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Posted by Bob the Lawyer (Member # 3278) on :
 
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.
 

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Posted by Zevlag (Member # 1405) on :
 
Tom, POP is fine, mail2web is great, but why not use IMAP?

[ June 15, 2004, 01:48 PM: Message edited by: Zevlag ]
 

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Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
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*
 

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Posted by saxon75 (Member # 4589) on :
 
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.
 

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Posted by Scott R (Member # 567) on :
 
Tom, specifically, what is so terrible about webmail?

The WORST I can think of is spam accessibility and easily cracked pwords.

But webmail is convenient and easily configurable. Those are big, big draws.
 

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Posted by Bokonon (Member # 480) on :
 
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.

-Bok
 

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Posted by Ela (Member # 1365) on :
 
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 ]
 

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Posted by CaySedai (Member # 6459) on :
 
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.
 

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Posted by Nato (Member # 1448) on :
 
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.
 

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Posted by Zevlag (Member # 1405) on :
 
Those of you that are experiencing problems with Yahoo today, it is due to DNS problems with the Akamai services.
 

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Posted by Annie (Member # 295) on :
 
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
 

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Posted by Damien (Member # 5611) on :
 
spymac.com 1GB inbox, ftp access, blog, etc. >_>
 

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Posted by JaneX (Member # 2026) on :
 
100 MB of storage. Awesome. Now I have actual space in my inbox.

~Jane~

[ June 15, 2004, 04:29 PM: Message edited by: JaneX ]
 

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Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
 
Of course this mean all spam will now come with the maximum possible attachments.
 

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Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
 
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:

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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.

[snip -- lots of advertising below]

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Posted by Corwin (Member # 5705) on :
 
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
 

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Posted by sarcasticmuppet (Member # 5035) on :
 
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.
 

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Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
 
*does cartwheels* No more painful pruning of emails I might or might not need!

No more horror when people send me pictures! YAHOOOOO!

It was really slow this morning, but it's faster than usual now.
 

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Posted by dabbler (Member # 6443) on :
 
(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.
 

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Posted by Ela (Member # 1365) on :
 
::gets very little spam in my Yahoo accounts::

::using webmail as my primary email right now::
 

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Posted by Telperion the Silver (Member # 6074) on :
 
Just wanted to say beware of G-Mail!!!

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.
 

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Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
 
(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.
 

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Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
 
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.

Hobbes
 

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Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
 
cracking up at the google ad running below this page.

quote:

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Need Help with Email?
Support for all "Email" problems? Call 1-888-GEEK-HELP Now !

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quote:

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Who cares? The written word was invented to communicate, not hide

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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...
 

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Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
 
(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.
 

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Posted by Raia (Member # 4700) on :
 
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!
 

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Posted by Telperion the Silver (Member # 6074) on :
 
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.
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
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.
 

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Posted by Telperion the Silver (Member # 6074) on :
 
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.
 

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Posted by Bokonon (Member # 480) on :
 
So you don't use spam filters then?

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.

-Bok
 

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Posted by Bokonon (Member # 480) on :
 
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.

-Bok

[ June 16, 2004, 03:21 PM: Message edited by: Bokonon ]
 

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Posted by SoberTillNoon (Member # 6170) on :
 

quote:

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*shudder* Webmail....

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You took the words right out of my mouth.
 

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Posted by Telperion the Silver (Member # 6074) on :
 
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*
 

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Posted by Bokonon (Member # 480) on :
 
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.

http://www.davidbrin.com/tschp1.html

-Bok
 

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Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
 
I hope you're not offended by this Thor, but I scrutinize every move you make.
 

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Posted by Telperion the Silver (Member # 6074) on :
 
Bok, that is a very intriguing article...

I guess what I would say in answer to it is that if we are doomed to be spied apon and gazed and studied by everybody we better all get ALOT more comfortable with each other, because I don't think everyone will become like the Victorians again. Society and Government will either become oppressive or very open minded about sex, masterbation, drug use, people going to the bathroom, etc, etc...

Even everyone knowing that we are prone to cancer.... either the health care system evolved to cover them or since they are a bad risk they don't get any coverage...
 

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Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
 
Humans are much more adaptable than Luddites (especially privacy pundits) give them credit. I think everyone should go back and read the Usenet privacy discussions circa 1996. The first generation of WWW search engines was coming out, and a lot of people thought that exposing all the information available via http to an unknown audience would cause the end of the world as we know it. They were right, but not the way they thought Sure the government has more at its fingertips now than it did a decade ago, but by preserving the essentially many-to-many nature of the medium, we've seen the largest growth in stored knowledge + freedom of expression in history.

Aside: "privacy" as we know it has really only been around as long as widespread urbanization, and with it, anonymity. The main reason it's not in the original BoR is because nobody cared at the time. It takes some mighty creative reading of the 14th Amendment (which itself is only barely an industrial-revolution artifact) to extract this notion. Fast-forward, and today's kids are growing up on LiveJournal. I'm optimistic we'll have the chance to put informational protectionism in the dumpster where it belongs in our lifetime.
 

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Posted by Telperion the Silver (Member # 6074) on :
 
My concern is with freedom. For example...I don't mind having the population disarmed, as long as the government and police are disarmed too. I don't mind widespread information, as long as it's not used against you.

Rich, I can see and actually feel your optimism about this. But we must go carefully.
 

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Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
 
It depends what you mean by that. "Carefully" can mean "plan it until you get it right," which is great. However, "carefully" in this country usually means "slowly" -- I think that's a terrible idea, since another area humans have proven very adaptable is in their acceptance of government intrusions so long as each step looks innocuous. If history is any indication, we might be best off throwing open the floodgates: it's scary, exciting, and most importantly impossible to reverse. Not even China was able to ban Altavista with much success.

Our present modes of operation won't all work, but we seem to have better luck correcting after the fact than wishing for good intentions. For example, if tomorrow everyone suddenly had fully operational RFID cars, the way current software is programmed approximately 8 billion tickets would be mailed in the first few hours. Not pretty, but you can bet we'd finally have the momentum to write some sane traffic regulations, especially when politicians discover it's too late to write in backdoors that excuse them from their little revenue schemes.
 

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Posted by Telperion the Silver (Member # 6074) on :
 
I'm all for change... as long as it's slow. When we have fast change it usually comes in the form of war or civil war.

But your point about being too slow and that "humans have proven very adaptable is in their acceptance of government intrusions so long as each step looks innocuous" is VERY correct.

How to strike a balance?
 

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