Kathleen signed up for a Yahoo account four days ago. Yesterday she tried to log on and was told there was a problem with her mail server. She tried to log on once again…and was informed that her account had been canceled. No specific reason was given, although the automated message told her it was one of three: (1) extended non-use of the account (nooooo), (2) she’d requested it discontinued herself (nooooo), or (3) an unnamed violation of terms of service. Best guess: In less than three days, someone hacked into her account and used it to send around spam, and they punished Kathleen for it with no mechanism for customer service follow-up. No “We shut down your account, but here’s how to write to us or phone us to discuss it or figure out what went wrong.” Instead it’s simply, Boom, you’re gone.
Is it possible to do some digging and find contact info for Yahoo? Yeah. But this is certainly a crap-ášš way to treat customers.
PAD
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Yeah, Yahoo can blow… I’ve had an account with them for over five years, and every day I at least get 200 mails in Bulk Mail folder.
Sometimes, just sometimes they have problems.
That’s why I stick with a cable modem instead of Yahoo DSL. If my webmail gets that much spam, think what my regular mail would do…
Travis
I have only dealt with Yahoo in regards to playing Fantasy Sports, and I can tell you their customer service is horrible in this area as well. People cheat and abuse others on message boards, and when you send a complaint in to Yahoo, all you get is an automated message thanking you and telling you appropriate steps are being taken. After that, you realize absolutely NOTHING is being done, and complaining was just a complete waste of time.
Mike
As an amusing corollary, I cancelled my account with MSN a bit over a month ago, and starting last week (or maybe it was two weeks ago), they’ve been sending me e-mails saying there’s something wrong with my billing information, so they can’t process my monthly subscription charges.
*sigh* At least they’re giving me customer service numbers if I want to do something about this…
I’ve had a yahooaccount for several years (actually two). I once had a problem with my “commercial” account (the one I use when I have to give out an e-mail address) and had to cancel it, but, generall, I’ve been problem free. I only get maybe five junk mail things a day (at the high end) in that account, never any in my other one. Maybe I’ve just been lucky.
The “actually two” was in reference to accounts, not years (it’s been about four years). I guess I didn’t make that clear now that I read it.
Lately much of the mail coming to me from Yahoo (like Yahoo Groups mailing lists) to my RoadRunner address is bouncing back to Yahoo, which means I don’t get my mail and eventually they kick me off Yahoo Groups. In return, mail sent from any of my RoadRunner addresses to a Yahoo address gets trashed by their spam filters. I’m not the only one, and I’m beginning to think it’s a Yahoo/RR war. Whatever it is, it’s immensely annoying.
I never get spam. I have Hotmail, and I keep my Inbox set to “Exclusive” so that I can only can get mail from addresses that are in my Contacts List. The only thing is that when exchanging email addresses with someone, you have to make sure to put their address in your Contacts List.
Once in a while, I’ll order a book from Amazon.com, or I’ll sign up to someone’s mailing list, like John Stossel’s, and since I don’t know the address from which it’ll come, I might temporarily take it off “Exclusive” and then put back there after getting the introductory email and putting the address in the Contacts List. Changing the setting takes seconds.
I tried Yahoo, but I don’t care for the visual arrangement of the graphics of my mail. So just go to http://www.hotmail.com.
Hope this helps.
Not sure who Kathleen is, but can’t she bum and e-mail address off your peterdavid.net account? Assuming she’s related to you somehow, of course.
Going to WonderCon this year? 🙂
I used to use Yahoo! because I could check my Yahoo! email via Outlook Express. It really helped cut down on the amount of email stored because I could save my emails offline. (I’m a pack-rat, what can I say?) Then a few years ago Yahoo! wanted to start charging people $30 a year to check their Yahoo! email via Outlook Express and other POP3 email programs. That’s when I switched to Hotmail. Not thrilled at some of the quirkiness Hotmail has to offer, but a) it’s a free email account so I really can’t complain too much, b) I can check my email using Outlook Express and I don’t have to dish out any money and c) I don’t have to put up with Yahoo!
I still use Yahoo! groups for mailing lists but sometimes it takes forever for me to get the emails from Yahoo! Groups while others on the list (surprisingly enough with Yahoo! email addresses) get the mail in no time.
*shrugs* There’s a reason why it’s sometimes referred to as Ya-hëll…
You get what you pay for. Free Account, no service.
Personally, I have to change Yahoo account about every six months as the spammers catch up with me.
Yeah, Yahoo can be really, really weird, and have things happen for no apparent reason.
Case in point: About a year and a half ago, I wanted to be able to access my Yahoo mail without going to the Yahoo website, using a different program. This is a premium service, and costs money. Well, somehow, between the last time I paid for something using my Yahoo wallet and that time, something went weird… my password wasn’t working, and when I went to re-set it, the site claimed that the birthdate I was giving them was not the one I originally used when signing up. Now, naturally, I’ve had this birthday all my life… but they insisted it was incorrect.
What to do, what to do? Well, it took some work, but I finally got through to a real person at Yahoo… who told me there was nothing they could do, if I couldn’t come up with the birthdate their computers had stored, however wrong it is, I couldn’t buy any Yahoo services.
My response back was, “So you’re telling me there’s nothing you can do, I can keep using the free services Yahoo provides, but there’s no way I can use any services which I would have to *pay* Yahoo for?”
The answer I got back was, “Yes, that’s right.” Freakin’ ridiculous.
By the way, for what it’s worth, I have a Hotmail account, too. My Yahoo email addres is spread all over the net, I only use the Hotmail account for a few things, never put that email address out anywhere… but I get way more junk mail on Hotmail than Yahoo.
Jon
I like yahoo. It’s hotmail that I’m on the run from. How many emails for viagra, pëņìš enlargement, and online degrees can one girl get in a day? Apparently 70. I’m on my sixth hotmail account and the spam keeps tracking me down. Not so with yahoo. I had a bulk mail influx problem a couple of months ago, wrote to customer service, and it stopped. The two events probably aren’t related (the writing and the stopping) but in any case I’m happy again.
Contact info for Yahoo! os here:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/address/
I’ve never really had a problem with Yahoo. I use POP3 to access my mail and the additonal header entry X-YahooFilteredBulk: they add to denote spam is areally easy to filter out. Saying that I have heard of some really serious problems – one of the largest DC Yahoo groups (EverythingDC) was deleted by a hacker recently and Yahoo have been rather unwilling to help get it back.
For what it’s worth, people might be interested in knowing that Yahoo’s announced that at some point this quarter they’ll stop using Google to power their algorithmic search results and start using Inktomi et al (various search engines they’ve bought over the last year) for ’em. Don’t know how obvious they’ll make the switchover when it happens.
“But this is certainly a crap-ášš way to treat customers.”
It is a free service. You get what you pay for. Godaddy.com and others offer email services at good prices.
For free you could try http://www.myrealbox.com. Its a demo system for Novell’s Netmail, has good spam shields, its fast, reliable and has no advertising.
I have Yahoo DSL and have never had a problem with my yahoo mail account. It’s hotmail that I hate. I use that account for work purposes and they’ve cut it off three times. Run from hotmail. Run
Off topic: Do any of the Captain Marvel trades contain issues 7-8. I know the first one has 1-6, but does volume two only have the Coven story? Any help would be great.
To answer Nacho: Vol. 2 has issues 7-12.
Re: Yahoo: I only have a free yahoo mail account set up as a spam absorber, and so I can talk to ex-classmates on the messenger. I’ve never had that kind of problem before, but the site http://www.filmthreat.com had the same problem with their yahoo mailing list a few years back, so I guess it happens. Sucks that they totally reamed you on CS. I suggest throwing the CEO into the warp core of the Excalibur. 😉
I signed my mother up for a Yahoo account when I wanted to contact her at work and her work e-mail service was down.
Eventually, within two days, she was kicked off for doing something “illegal”.
Morons.
Yet, I still keep my Yahoo account and have had it for a couple of years.
CJA
CJA
Yeah, my experience with both Yahoo and Hotmail (owned by Micro$uck) has been the same: Free service means no customer service and no effort to help anyone with a problem with their account.
Ironically though, the email account where I get the worst amount of spam is my work email. You’d think working for state government, they’d do something to protect their servers, but no.
I use a company called ENI Internet, and except for the occasional dropped connection it works fine.
I did get a free Yahoo! email account, just so if I order anything from a site that sends junk mail (Amazon, adult sites, whatever), I can have it sent there instead of my main email. And if it ever builds up too much, I can just cancel it and get a new one.
I’ve been using yahoo mail since 1998 with no problem. They’ve even extended the storage space I was allocated for free. I get a little spam, but the vast majority ends up in my bulk box, so I just hit delete every few days, and no prob. Hotmail sucks @$$
Mr. D, I understand your reluctance to share an E-mail address with your WIFE (that’s for the sake of MTK above). Let’s be honest, you and she want to buy different things and want different e-mail accounts so you can’t accidentally discover your birthday present in advance.
And while I’ve had no problems with Yahoo, apparently newcomers have. Perhaps she could get a small webspace account with an e-mail address. (I use a place called drak.net for a web space account…it’s run by a Wiccan, and perhaps her protective spells have kept problems away for me.)
Or maybe whoever is providing space for YOUR web page can arrange a cheap POP3 account she can use.
MTK, Kathleen is Peter’s wife.
i have 3 yahoo accounts, 2 hotmail accounts, and to be honest, yahoo disgusts me. I’ve had my account since 1998 and i get 300 piece of spam a day and so it closes my email account every day at about 6 pm… hotmail on the other hand just blocks it from ever hitting my account… gross…
Ra!
I have had both Yahoo and Hotmail accounts (as fallback accounts, etc) for a number of years.
I have some stuff sent to Yahoo, but I rarely get spam there, thankfully.
But I do use a number of Yahoo Groups, and, aside from problems I had with an old email service, Yahoo’s stuff in general (email and mailing lists) has been pretty good.
I should add…
I used to get alot more spam at Hotmail than I do these days, so maybe their filters appear to be working.
But, it doesn’t take much to get spam.
When I was using Earthlink for an ISP, I didn’t even log into the email account for 6 months.
The day I did, I had over 1500 spam mails.
Atleast twice that many more had gotten filtered out.
For an email account I had yet to use…
And I was paying for this!? 🙂
I’ve had e-mail accounts on hotmail and yahoo for about the same length of time, and as Jon & Jadis have observed, the amount of spam I receive with the hotmail account is simply staggering; such that over the past two years I’ve moved everyone I know off it and onto my yahoo address. These days I logon to hotmail once a fortnight just to sneer at the hundreds of spam e-mails that have materialised. I get probably 3-5 spam messages a day to my Yahoo account.
Is it possible that Hotmail/Microsoft have deliberately handed out their address lists in the past? Because the contrast between hotmail & yahoo, for me – with about similar mailing practices with both accounts in the beginning – couldn’t be greater.
Brad
Keep in mind that for both Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, spammers find it “cost efficient” just to send spam to all combinations of letters up to some length, since so many accounts are known to exist on the services. A four letter account name will get a lot more spam than “thisisalongnametokillspam@yahoo.com“
I have a yahoo account and a yahoo group. it’s not so bad, but then I have had no problems (knocking on wood). However, almost everybody I know does have something bad to say about yahoo. It’s free, so how much can you really complain?
Might I recommend fastmail.fm? It’s a much better e-mail service than Yahoo. Good spam controls, easier to integrate with an external e-mail program like Outlook, and more storage space. Plus, they’re friendly.
I’ve been able to prove that Hotmail does indeed sell its email lists, but not directly to spammers. They sell them to “partners” (aka paid advertisers). The massive spamming begins because not all of their “partners” are trustworthy – some re-sell the lists Microsoft gives them to turn an extra profit.
Yahoo also sells its email lists to partners, but they seem to scrutinize their advertisers more carefully than Microsoft does.
Whoops, I guess I should tell everyone how I managed to prove it. 🙂
I created several Hotmail and Yahoo accounts with oddball names and basically left them idle without using any of them for any purpose whatsoever. I used MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger mail notification to tell me what’s in the mailbox. Within a week, all of the Hotmail accounts got spam. Yahoo took a lot longer.
I had similar problems with website manager Crosswinds. They closed the site without so much as an advisory note as to WHY they closed it. It was pretty bášŧárdlÿ of them to do this, and it was bášŧárdlÿ for Yahoo to do this to Kathleen.
JHL
Ðámņ that came twice. Sorry folks.
JHL
“I can check my email using Outlook Express…”
But why would you want to? I far, FAR prefer Eudora which has the advantages of being better to use (and it isn’t a MicroSoft product) and doesn’t have all those viruses written for it that Outlook does.
As for Yahoo!, I used to use D
Yahoo is notorious for screwing people over. I know a lot of folks who had very nice little Yahoo groups abruptly nuked with no reason given at all. And I gave up my Yahoo e-mail account long ago because it was buggy as hëll.
I only ever used Yahoo and Hotmail as my “junk e-mail” addresses. My real one only handed out to close friends and family. This worked well in filtering out the spam until last year, when I got hit by the SOBIG virus. More specifically, my personal e-mail address was in someone else’s contact list, which spread SOBIG to me.
Since then, my personal e-mail box resembles more like my junk mailboxes from Hotmail. My Yahoo account expired years ago from non-use. Surprisingly, Microsoft must have improved their filters for spam, as the number of daily junk mail I receive in Hotmail is less than 10 a day. On the other hand, my personal e-mail box gets on average of 75-100 spam pieces a day.
Hotmail has indeed improved their spam filters a lot lately. While I used to get dozens of mails a day, now I only get less than five. Sometimes even none. And yahoo has never had more than a couple a month, and those I was probably responsible for by signing up for stuff.
All the people who are ocmplaining about massive spam at yahoo, ask yourselves if oyu’ve given out the addy to any sites or posted it somehwere, because that probably has a lot to dow ith it. Yahoo’s far from perfect, but they do keep me spam-free.
Maybe you should give Comcast.net a try. I have had my account for over a year now and have not received any Spam. While I know what Spam is I have yet to experience it and hope to keep it that way. I guess you do get what you pay for.
I was going to recommend myrealbox.com, as well, but they have suspended any new enrollments. I have both Yahoo and Hotmail, the issue with them and spam is that you have to double check all of your account settings as soon as you set up the account, otherwise you might be opted in and get tons of junk mail. Of course, neither service makes it very easy to find these settings. I am currently using http://www.myway.com as my primary free email provider and have never had an issue with spam (been using the service for over a year now.) It is free, and they offer 6 megs of mail space, as opposed to Yahoo’s 4 megs and Hotmails puny 2 megs. If you want to pay, you should go to godaddy.com and sign up for their hosted email service, with spam blocking. That is what I am going to do for my parents, as they keep moving around and changing email addresses when they change ISPs. This way, they can still use Outlook Express and not have to tell everyone every time.
I also lost my account for no reason last year, except I’d had mine for over 4 years. Needless to say I was angry, and, though there may be one, I could never find a way to contact anyone who had any idea of how to help me get my account back. And yeah, everyone points out that Yahoo is free, but free crap is still crap, and in my experience, most people don’t want crap.
Oh…if it’s spam you’re worried about, there is a web handler that is recommended by Bartcop (the great Wielder of the Hammer against Bush). It’s at http://www.ctyme.com/hosting/index.htm
and for $30 a year, you get a single e-mail account that reportedly has very fierce spam elimination. It deletes all executable code and has some well-maintained spam filters.
Funny, I’ve had my yahoo email account for years. I’ve always used yahoo. In fact I dumped hotmail because of their šhìŧ service and crap pop up ads. I’ve never ever had any problems or anyone hack into my account, knock on wood.
Here’s a hint. Yahoo is 100 percent automated. You don’t actually think there’s a live admin sitting behind his desk at yahoo do ya?? I learned a long, long, time ago, these web portals and search engines are NOT manned by humans. If they are, you coulda fooled me.
PS: Dont know about hotmail but with yahoo you have to go into your profile and change the settings on the market directory link cause if you dont check ‘no’ to each and every one on your profile, they will spam you. If you edit your profile setting etc, the spam gets reduced to nothing.
I’m with peoplepc.com and have been for 3.5 years. I have had zero problems with their e.mail setup. I get so little spam that I haven’t had to take the time to block the few that I get.
Peoplepc dial-up costs 10 or 11 bucks per month.
I have used yahoo for about 3 years now and I dont get any junk mail. I took the proper steps when signing up and unchecked the boxes when it asked me what I wanted sent to me from yahoo. I could just be luck but if you are having major trouble with junk mail you might wanna try that.
Best of luck to you all.
Yahoo sucks totally! I just lost my email account and all the info in it after 8 years of using the service. Apparently some spammers got in and changed ALL of my account info. Took over my account and spammed everyone in my address book. Yahoo account security sucks, hey can’t help me. All of it GONE. I have lost all my contacts too, and have warned all my friends still using Yahoo to update/change their account info ASAP. As for me, I will never use Yahoo services again. No Yahoo mail, finance, messenger. Nothing.
I have found http://www.myway.com to be a decent email service. Haven’t received any spam in my box from that service, then again I don’t use it much. Though for my main email, I have decided to switch to Gmail. It’s freakin’ awesome!