Yahoo email is now officially creeping me out
I got a little note from Yahoo email today saying:
As part of our continuing effort to provide you with a wonderful Yahoo! Mail experience, we want to make sure the mail you send gets to the friends, family or other contacts you are trying to reach. In support of this commitment, we have removed Yahoo! email addresses from your address book that are no longer valid. All other information remains part of your address book.
Well now, who doesn’t have access to my e-mail account?
But at least the government hasn’t been fiddling around with my address book and making changes in it, as far as I know. They’ve kept a low profile. And that this is an official Yahoo communication rather than spam is indicated by the fact that Yahoo then goes on to list two email addresses (both Yahoo addresses, by the way) that they have helpfully deleted from my address book because those addresses are no longer active. And these are real email addresses from my list, not fake ones.
So I hope it’s Yahoo rather than some spammer, because if it’s a spammer then that’s just one more entity spying on me. Good thing I’m not paranoid.
And while we’re on the subject of email, Yahoo’s new format is—as these things nearly always tend to be—one step forward, two backwards. The pluses: automatic loading of new emails, and probably some other things I have yet to discover. The minuses: can’t open e-mails in a new window. The back command doesn’t work correctly. Loading of the whole schmazoo is incredibly slow. Signing out takes an extra step, too.
There’s more, but I’ll stop there. And don’t tell me to change to gmail—I have a gmail account, and it’s even worse.
I am feeling very curmudgeonly today.
[ADDENDUM: More here.]
YOU ARE NOT ALONE, N-Neocon.
I got that Yahoo news yesterday and my wife received it this morning. We’ve been cussing for over a week at our computer screens due to this New Piece of S*** “Improved” Yahoo. We HATE it.
Ranks up there with facebooking and Trending on tweety to instagram so as to be a star in Binker & Breezy & Buffy’s little pinheads.
Other than a fist repeatedly through the wall…I’m whatcha’call Sanguine. But, hey, I KNOW for damn sure that Obama voters wuv-wuv-wuv the new and impwooooved Yahoo. Okay, I feel better now. (-:
You could delight your liberal friends with a reagan.com address. $40 a year and they don’t scan your emails. So they say. Been thinking of looking in to it for myself.
Whenever I hear someone complain about Yahoo’s of Gmail’s interface changes I always wonder the same thing: Why are you still using webmail? Get a decent email client like Opers, Thunderbird, or Incredimail to take care of this. You can still use their service, but you avoid all the ads and you can access ALL your email accounts at the same time. Seriously, I have 2 iCloud acounts, one gmail and one GMX account that I use one email program to manage. MUCH better than webmail. Which is almost universally crap.
Oh, I forgot to add that doing it this way means I have a private address book, not one that Google or Yahoo can access when they feel like.
I hate the changes too. What’s more, my computer used to open to a Mozilla page with a Google search. Now I get a Yahoo search. I suspect this has something to do with the German reaction to Google cooperation with NSA and Mozilla’s attempt to appear safe. But I got no notification. My computer is registered in Germany.
Kimoichi wahri huh?
I got that email too. They had only one name to remove but I think it is because I only use it as a download to my private email on my computer unless I am out of town. Then only if I reply have they ever had access to any of my correspondent addresses. When I set up my att.net account it defaulted to Yahoo and I declined to share the address book. Now I only keep it for the occasional person who doesn’t know my gmail address.
gmail is definitely going backwards. I figure there are a whold bunch of folks trying to keep their jobs by doing busy work 😉
I kept all my various addresses but I use Mozilla mail. I can read all my mail in one place and sort by name, subject, date or unread. If I write an email I just make sure I click on the address I want to use. Works as well as any other for spam, unfortunately.
Idiot Big Brother
The prospect of NSA abuse is now a reality.
Mark Steyn
I Agree. Gmail is crap. It always was, and it’s getting worse. But what can you expect for a free service ?
southpaw:
“What you you expect for a free service?”
If I didn’t know better, I would take offense :-).
Neo,
Something I learned a long time ago, if something can be abused it will be abused.
I just signed up for Reagan.com email. I am trying to get used to the formats on the webmail after using gmail for awhile. There seems to be a shortage of options by way of comarison, but perhaps they will refine it as it matures.
I miss my Outlook 2000: it got buggered a few months ago, and I’ve been on the “cloud” email for both accounts since then.
I need to get Outlook 2000 up and running again. It lives on my hard drive, and Yahoo/Google don’t get their cotton-pickin’ fingers into my address OR my folders (I think….)
I got the creepy Yahoo message too. They should have said, “Do you want us to clean out your contact list?” instead of just breaking in and doing it.
And remember that “privacy” is the Main thing that Winston (named in honor of Churchill, BTW) and Julia craved the most, and couldn’t find, in “1984.”
This email stuff, which I find as objectionable as any, leads me to think more of the mails, the USPS. There are legal barriers to messing with postal letters (as long as the laws are observed); I do not send out hardly any essential emails copied to a bunch of folks, so I am going to type letters instead of typing emails, and put them in envelopes way more; time is not of the essence in all communications.
I did see it reported somewhere that the Postal Service now photographs all 1st class stuff (recording sender and recipient addresses), though. But I don’t think they can see thru envelopes, at least not yet.
It’s kinda like me paying with cash instead of checks…less of a trail. It is not up to me to ensure that workmen pay their taxes on the trivial amounts I expend for their help. No credit cards at supermarkets either, thus no data mining.
Ferdinand and Isabella mandated that Spanish Jews convert to Catholicism or leave Spain without their assets. So Jews sewed jewels into their clothes and left. Others nominally converted….recent archeology found Jewish relics in New Mexico that date to the early 1500s!
As long as your otinicing thins, like the NSA, then the IG people want to exam_ne y_our emials.
Neo, maybe fine for a Free service, but I pay for my address.
I pay Bellsouth/AT&T for DSL service and part of that service is an email address. It was bad enough that they farmed it out to Yahoo! so they didn’t have to manage the mail server and website.
But now I have to accept Yahoo! scanning my email, messing with my address books, and who knows what’s next.
Sure, I can use POP and get my mail off the server and have a second address book in another mail tool.
But Yahoo! is still scanning my email, in or out. I have contacts listed for remote access using the web when traveling and not at my main computer that holds all my mail.