Yahoo Emails everyone

[Brett_Tabke]

Those that are just noticing, your Yahoo personal preferences on my.yahoo have been reset. They have be set to "yes" for all the spam, email, snail, and other marketing tieins.

If your level of spam skyrockets, you can thank Yahoo.

You can set them back by logging into your my.yahoo account and taking the "edit my marketing preferences" link and unchecking the options.

[msr986]

Thanks Brett!

How long ago did this happen?

-Marty

[mivox]

Last day or two, I think...

But I'm killing/forgetting about my Yahoo Mail account anyhow, now that they are charging for POP access to the account. Just switched all my "spam heavy" website registrations to my ISP email (which I've never used at all).

[Brett_Tabke]

Ya - just yesterday they say.

[DrCool]

Good catch Brett. At least the didn't automatically set "yes" for information from their parnters. That would have really filled up mailbox with spam.

[Lisa]

That is crazy! This should make the frontpage! I just checked. And yes. The YES radio button was checked for all.

They should warn people. This is a very bad mark for Yahoo. Yahoo is going down hill fast.

[Lisa]

I just found this in the help area...

"Yahoo! is notifying users of these changes to marketing preferences via email. Your new marketing preferences will not take effect until 60 days after the date the email is sent to you so you have plenty of time to decide what you want to receive and what you don't."

[bigjohnt]

That ticks me off. I got the notice of changes to my PRIVACY, but no mention of changing my preferences. This is not unlike a MS tactic.

[Brett_Tabke]

The scarey one is snail mail and Phone. Thank goodness I didn't give them an accurate one for either and also gave them another freebie email when I signed up!

[mivox]

Hehe... They've practically got my entire life's story. I'm just hoping they honor user preferences. They don't have any problem changing them, so one wonders if they'll eventually just start ignoring them...

[Brett_Tabke]

Think about all the mass of data Yahoo could accumulate on people? It makes Double Click look like amatures.

[EliteWeb]

Everyone cashes in on your data, lets all group together find a good laywer and sue some of these companies who spam, i dont give a fhh if they say it is a +opt in list, couz its not and I never wanted it and they're wasting my bandwidth, it uses my time reading/deleting the junk email.

[electro]

Thank goodness I told them a whole bunch of lies when I signed up :) What a shame, I was just getting into Yahoo for secondary email and their groups, dear dear. I wonder at what point they did a marketing survey and found that people like loads of spam?

[caine]

I use my Yahoo account for various things, that i know will hammer my address with spam. Checked my acc today. over 700 mails, where did they come from, though i did leave it for a few months.

If yahoo want to dish out spam, they are more than welcome, they can dish it out to their own servers, and i will just check in once and a while, when i want to do online questionnaires, that require an email address.

good arrangement to me.

[electro]

Yeh, that will be the way I'll be using my account from now on, bit of a shame because it was spam free :( I just noticed that pop access was tured off when I unticked all those boxes. Oh well, I reset it, but I know I'll have to give it up soon (60 days, is it?). Oh well, onwards and downwards :)

[brotherhood of LAN]

I stick with my free ISP account. And I agree, Yahoo is going down fast

[msr986]

OK, It hit the front page!

[msnbc.com...]

[EliteWeb]

Thats good to see their whole plan has been uncovered and exploited to the world!

[mivox]

Wheee... I just set up a "vacation message" autoresponder for the next 6 months, directing any long-lost friends that might try the Yahoo addy to my new spam-catch address.

Not only will Yahoo be spamming themselves through my address, but they'll be clogging their mailservers with autoresponses every time they do.

This is fun. :) (Maybe I should go back now and re-set all my spam preferences, excuse me, Marketing Preferences, to "Yes" now?)

[caine]

I think it is a well deserved justice

[mivox]

heheheheee.... That was fun. How long 'till the mailbox is full? Hmm....

[scareduck]

Check out http://spamassassin.org for those using Unix-like (BSD, Linux, etc.) OS's. There's also work being done on an NT version. All my incoming mail goes through this and it is *amazingly* effective -- I almost never see spam anymore, and what I do get is tagged for diversion into a separate folder. I have a friend who has an old and widely public e-mail address -- getting 100+ spams a day, now it's all pre-filtered. Many happy campers. Development is very active.

[diddlydazz]

I have a PC/Internet related site, I am going to put a BIG piece on the homepage about this and tell everyone NOT to use Yahoo (unless they need to ;))

This is disgraceful

Dazz

[JeremyL]

As soon as I went in and changed the selection back to NO they disabled my POP service. SAD!

[john316]

Thanks for the heads up, it's sad to see Y! doing things like this.

[electro]

JeremyL - as soon as you check "NO" in the Yahoo! Delivers box, it switches off the pop access (which is going to happen soon anyway unless you pay for it). Leave the box on "YES", go to "Edit your Yahoo! Delivers preferences." .You _HAVE_ to agree to recieve mail, so tick the "Yes Send me special offers from selected Yahoo! partners through Yahoo! Delivers." box, but then directly below, _also_ tick in the "Only send me offers for categories I select below." box, then make sure NOTHING IS SELECTED below! Done.

[nwilson]

Go right ahead Yahoo!
All my yahoo stuff gets picked up and immediatly /dev/null'ed anyway.

It is rather naughty though eh?

[kapow]

> OK, It hit the front page!

Hmmm thats an MSN front page. Funny that MSN are making a point about this, Hotmail are the biggest spam-fritters in the Universe.

[awcabot]

When I am asked for my e-mail address from various sites, say www.site.com that I know they do not need it, I often put in [e-mail], so they can start receiving their own spam.

What is even better is if you can find the actual e-mail used by one of their employees, so they start getting cobs of spam!

Violate my privacy at your own peril

[diddlydazz]

Lisa <--- I just found this in the help area...

Could you sticky me the URL or post it, I would like to see that page.

Thanks :)

Dazz