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The Almighty Buck

Yahoo To Try To Charge For POP3 Services 432

Posted by Hemos from the one-less-address-to-block dept.
NetSerf2000 writes: "I just saw an article on the Register that Yahoo is giving users of it's email service until the 24th of April to make a decision about forking out $19.99 for the first year. Yahoo states that this is so it can 'improve' service quality and 'reduce" spam.' The report says that it's the mailing forwarding and POP3 services, so I'm not sure that it affects the Webmail service; if it reduces the spam coming out of Yahoo!, that'd be one less domain I have to filter into "Spam," which would be nice.
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Yahoo To Try To Charge For POP3 Services More

Yahoo To Try To Charge For POP3 Services

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  • Paying For Yahoo? (Score:3, Funny)

    by DonkeyHote ( 521235 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @12:12PM (#3200484) Homepage Journal
    Haha, I'd sooner pay for a slashdot subscription.
    • Slashdot is in a fairly unique position as far as this goes. Okay, so there are some other geek news sites, but I along with a lot of other people will always read Slashdot. Yahoo on the other hand is one of the millions of web based e-mail services. I'm sure there will be others prepared to offer free POP3 e-mail, causing people who rely on such free services to switch away from Yahoo. I use my own domain (which I could probably get for the price of a Yahoo POP3 account) and would not switch to Yahoo as a matter of principle.
      • If all you want is a free web-baed mail with POP access, newmail.net [newmail.net] offers such a service. they are not very fast, but they do the job.

  • It's pretty fair... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rodbegbie ( 4449 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @12:12PM (#3200491) Homepage
    If you're using the forwarding or POP3, then you're not viewing the web-page adverts that are Yahoo's bread & butter.

    So you'd be paying not to see adverts. What a zany idea.

    rOD.

    • Re:It's pretty fair... (Score:4, Funny)

      by rixster ( 249481 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @12:16PM (#3200527) Journal
      Pay not to see adverts ? That'll never take off. ... err. oh dear.

    • Re:It's pretty fair... (Score:3, Informative)

      by saveth ( 416302 )
      In order to use the mail forwarding service, however, you have to agree to receive monthly advertisement emails from Yahoo!. So, you still get the advertisements, just not on the screen in all their colourful, blinking glory.
      • The odd thing is that Yahoo gives you a choice of where you want your monthly emails sent. You can just have it sent to a spammotel address and never worry about it...

        I doubt the emails are very effective anyway. I automatically delete anything that says "Yahoo Delivers" as the sender before I even open the message. At least with web page ads I presumably at least see them...

    • Re:It's pretty fair... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Chundra ( 189402 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @12:21PM (#3200579)
      I have an idea for the slashdot editors and their zany paying-not-to-see-ads scheme. Why not randomly post large pictures of Mr. Goatse.cx? I would pay to not see that.

    • Re:It's pretty fair... (Score:2, Informative)

      by ari{Dal} ( 68669 )
      If you're using the forwarding or POP3, then you're not viewing the web-page adverts that are Yahoo's bread & butter.
      Actually, in order to sign up for yahoo's pop3 service, you MUST agree to receive 'selected promotions' in your mail. Granted, they give you the choice as to how many (minimum of one per week) and if you want them in text or HTML (thank god), but you don't have a choice. Removing yourself from their 'promotional marketing' list means you can't pop your account at all.
      I rarely use my yahoo account anyway.. I think i have three or four that are sitting idle (due to groups and other assorted things) that I just don't bother with. All my group accounts forward to a specific account on my own domain (if it gets too spam-ridden, i change it).
      In today's economy, with profits from ad banners down and the average netizen finally showing that they're ready to pay for better services, I'm not surprised to see things like this happening. Almost all of the big web companies offer premium services at a price; IMHO it's a good way for them to make some revenue on a service that people want.

      • Re:It's pretty fair... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jafac ( 1449 )
        Please, send me all the promotional email you want, as long as each and every one of the fuckers begins with "ADV" so I can filter it. Spam doesn't bother me one bit. It's the spam that pretends to be normal email that frustrates the hell out of me.

        And Yahoo's spam filter is a joke. Mailing list email that I receive ends up going into the spam filter, but actual spam from companies like Bottom Line (I never opted it) ends up in my inbox. The only reasonable conclusion I can draw is that their spam filter is lame, and that spammers probably can pay yahoo a kickbox to be excluded from the filtering.
    • Any e-mail sent through Yahoo's SMTP gateway gets a little ad slapped onto the bottom of the message. The ad is usually for a Yahoo service, but it's an ad anyway you slice it.

      Even if you're using POP3, someone still gets to view an ad.

      Do you think this will change once I fork over $19.99 a month? Likely story.

      ::Colz Grigor
    • This will fail. I use Yahoo mail every day, and would have loved to use the service when it was free... but I never knew they even offered it!

      Yahoo's site design is so utterly cluttered these days that I am unaware of most of their services. It's too much trouble to explore their site, much easier to just stick with the bare minimum you do now.
    • I was using GeoCities free POP3 E-mail service. Then Yahoo! acquired GeoCities.

      The rollover went smoothly.

      A few months later I was asked to sign up for Yahoo! Delivers, that's what they call thier POP3 service, in order to continue accessing my E-mail via POP3. They ask you to check this box in your user preferences that says you agree that Yahoo! may send advertisments to you via E-mail, and in exchange you may use their service via POP3.

      I checked the box, eventually abandoned my GeoCities E-mail. After GeoCities became a part of Yahoo!, all GeoCities E-mail was only forwarded to the new address. I never, however, received any of the mail Yahoo! asked for my permission to deliver. Maybe this was because of my special transfer situation.

      I'd imagine, if there were any ads, people using their client software to block the ads might have been a problem.

      As for me, NetTaxi [nettaxi.com] still offers free POP3 access. For the time being.

  • Avid User (Score:3, Informative)

    by ViceClown ( 39698 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @12:14PM (#3200503) Homepage Journal
    I am an all-day user of pop forwarding for my Yahoo account. To be quite honest - I get 0 spam to it as well. I only use it for personal communications and never for buying goods at stores - I let hotmail get all my spam. Anyway, with the belts getting tightened the world over I really don't mind ponying up $19 for a year's worth of spam-free email. I don't think that's alot to ask. I'll be signing up today.
    • Post your email address to a usenet group then tell me the same story.

      Fuck I get like 20 emails [from the same ISP in korea] a day. About buy some shitty sweaters and what have not.

      The only reason I use my yahoo account is for the time being it gets slightly less spam than my hotmail one.

      I honestly and whole heartedly believe spammers should just be shot. No fines or jail, just bring em out in the street and shoot them. They are a leech on what is good in the world and honestly don't deserve to live.

      Tom
    • The problem with Yahoo is not that Yahoo users receive spam, it's that spammers can sign up for as many disposable email addresses at yahoo as they want and send their spam from those addresses (with all sorts of spoofing techniques to mask their real email and IP addresses).

      The article says nothing about that being the intent of this move, but it seems to me that charging for email address might help to prevent spammers from signing up for tons of yahoo addresses to send their spam.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Hotmail used to do POP3 too ... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SirGeek ( 120712 ) <sirgeek-slashdot.mrsucko@org> on Thursday March 21, 2002 @12:15PM (#3200508) Homepage
    Then they realized how many people actually were using it instead of the web based ad-viewing interfaces.

    Yahoo's change is being done for purely business reasons (i.e. to increase ad viewing). It is so they can afford to keep their bandwith, not for anti-spamming/etc. Pretty simple.

    They could have done something like the qmail POP before accepting SMTP (to make users authenticate before being able to relay mail for them).

    • no, no they didn't. I was one of the original pre-MS HoTMaiL subscribers (within their first few months) and would have loved to see that. the whole idea behind it (and its name - take out vowels to get HTML, my case was the original) was that it was a web-based HTML-friendly mail service (the first I think) at a time when there weren't any; Eudora, NS, and others didn't know what HTML was (there was not Outlook).
  • Frankly, I really won't. I used to use Yahoo's POP3 service on a regular basis for an email account used only for registering with Web sites. Then somehow the account got on a spam list -- and the name isn't anything that would be easily guessed, though it does mean something to me. It's unusable because of the huge amounts of spam that flow into it.

    I stopped using the POP3 service months ago and got a new mailbox from a friend who runs his own Web and IRC system. The domain name of the new account means much more to me than Yahoo's, isn't labeled "freemail" for all those sites that won't take those, and best of all ... doesn't get spam. And because it's from a friend, it's free and if anything does go wrong, I can personally send complaints to the server administrator.

    Plus, he's a really nice guy. Yahoo's just a faceless megacorp.

  • Not all email just "Yahoo! Delivers" (Score:4, Informative)

    by torinth ( 216077 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @12:16PM (#3200523) Homepage
    Yahoo! is only planning on charging for their Yahoo! Delivers service. This is the service that permits you to access their POP3 and SMTP servers, or forward your yahoo.com mail to another address. Previously, the expense was that you had to sign up for opt-in spam through Yahoo!, but apparently, that wasn't working for them.

    Yahoo!'s web mail will still be free, and if you really need the POP3/SMTP/forwarding service, $20 a year really isn't that bad.
    • The only problem I get is the spam I get to the Yahoo! Mail box -- which requires me to use POP3 to transfer it to my local computer and then back out to SpamCop.net.

      If Yahoo! wants to stop spam by charging for services, it better charge for SMTP and use the money to pay for better admins and filter the spam better. May I recommend SPEWS and SBL?
  • Without giving out my Hotmail address to anyone, I received spam. Now I've given up on trying to block spam going into the account and just let it happen. I use that address to sign up to services on the web with, as I no longer care about it. My Yahoo account has a lot of spam too, although I got it intending to use it as my "signing up to new online services" address, so I can understand it having spam. I've heard rumours (and going by the privacy agreements it's prefectly possible) that web-based mail companies sell your e-mail address to mailing list companies. Owning a web-based email address is effectively opting in for spam. How can companies do that, and still announce publicly that they are working hard to try and reduce spam?
    • Owning a web-based email address is effectively opting in for spam. How can companies do that, and still announce publicly that they are working hard to try and reduce spam?

      Because they're trying to play all three sides of the fence.

      • Offer free paid-by-ads services to hook you in and get you cookies with them so you can be tracked
      • sell your identity/shopping habits/etc to third parties
      • protect themselves from even less scrupulous third parties who would profit from all their hard work by excluding spam from people who don't play their game (i.e. give them money).

      We haven't seen the third leg in this triad too much yet, but I predict it a comin from the likes of AOL, Yahoo, and MSN fast. It's only a matter of time until they find an effective way to make spam less costly for them and an additional source of revenue at the same time.

  • I don't want something for nuttin' (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JoshKOTW ( 548288 ) <joshkotw@nOSpAm.hotmail.com> on Thursday March 21, 2002 @12:18PM (#3200549) Homepage
    I'll take ads and propaganda as long as they aren't trying to trick me. I'd rather have text ads at the bottom of my emails than those damn x10 popup's, etc. Now the funny thing is...two things I use the most (and enjoy) online are yahoo mail and slashdot. But as soon as I saw the Yahoo mail change I thought well heck I can go for that no big deal and its worth it for the services I'll be receiving overall. But I don't plan to subscribe to the slashdot system. So I think an important lesson is to be learned here. I'll chalk up the $$ for the things that actually provide me a service. If slashdot ONLY allowed access to most thing by pay service then as long as it was reasonable I'd probably go in for it. But if I can take some annoyance or ads and still get my stuff for free then that's me.

  • mail.com is doing the same (Score:3, Interesting)

    by swordgeek ( 112599 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @12:18PM (#3200551) Journal
    Like the subject says. Mail.com is discontinuing free forwarding.

    I can understand their reasons, but this one in particular galls me. I signed up with iname.net for "free forwarding for life." mail.com bought them out, and maintained the services (although not as well) until now. Suddenly they've decided not to honour contracts that they've bought out.

    I don't mind the money, but those bastards aren't getting any from me for that sort of behaviour.
    • Same problem here. I've had my iname acct. for around four or five years now. And I would have had no problem paying to continue the forwarding service, accept that it seems they tried to make money by selling their user lists to spammers. So there's no way in hell I'll pay to keep having spam forwarded to one of my "real" email addresses. Instead I'll keep using it as free web-mail and sign it up for anything that I know will get spammed. They get money to sell it to spammers, I don't pay a thing - least I can do for a service that's been so good.
    • Suddenly they've decided not to honour contracts that they've bought out.

      If you don't pay anything for the service, is it still a binding contract? Or is the "consideration" your eyeballs?
  • ...did something similar. If you had autoforward turned on and forwarded to another account, you never had to give out your real email, but only had to check one. Of course, you never saw the ads on email.com's server, so they didn't get paid. So now that is part of the premium service.
  • lycos.co.uk has a good one:
    free 15 MB mailbox

    POP3 access
    up to 15 MB for attachments
    translate your mail to other languages
    Anyone know of any other good services?

  • Using forwarding on Yahoo! == less spam (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mjh ( 57755 ) <(moc.nalcnroh) (ta) (kram)> on Thursday March 21, 2002 @12:23PM (#3200598) Homepage Journal
    What's interesting to me about this is that I have my old yahoo account forwarded. I now have my own domain so I rarely use my yahoo account anymore except for testing.

    I've noticed that if I leave the yahoo account non-forwarded and only accessable through the web, that the account accumulates somewhere around 10-15 spams per day. Some of which get autmoatically put into bulk mail, some of which don't. But if I forward the account to my domain, I don't really get any spam at all. Perhaps 1-2 per week.

    I've tested this over several weeks now, and it's a strange thing. Yahoo! are the *only* people who know whether or not I'm forwarding. Are they sending more spam to webmail accounts in order to encourage people to move to forwarding accounts? Why would it behave like this?
    • Assuming you're using someone else's server to host your domain, they might be running a really nice spam killing package that does a good job of keeping up to date. Chances are, Yahoo doesn't. By forwarding, your domain's SMTP filters kill off the unwanted crap.
  • I use Yahoo's e-mail forwarding service, and I was caught by surprise by their charging. A man on a mission, I checked all my folders, including the trash bin. When I looked there, I found a message from Yahoo, detailing their change in prices.

    I had deleted it as spam. What does THAT tell you about Yahoo?

  • Yahoo wants more revenue from this service. They run a quality email service. The $19.95 gets you a bigger mailbox, allows larger attachemnts, and really isn't expensive, compared to other communication services (e.g. telephone service, which I don't even use as much as email, yet pay a hell of a lot more for). I'm happy to pay them so little for what I gain from it.
    • Yahoo wants more revenue from this service. They run a quality email service.

      Well now, I disagree with you there. I'd absolutely not call them a "quality" mail service. Frequently, I find myself unable to connect via POP3 because my password failed to authenticate on their servers (odd, since the password is stored on my mail client software, and it's never been changed). Over the past years I've gotten this error lots of times. Sometimes many times over the course of a day, soemtimes only once per week.

      So, I don't have a problem with them charging for it, but I'm not going to give them my money for what I consider to be a fairly lackluster job they've done. I mean, thanks for the free email guys, but I don't think you're worth the money.
      • I've never had problems with disruption of service. Compared to other webmail services, I have found Yahoo to be quite solid. I've changed ISPs a few times in the past couple years, and I've never had to worry about my mail.
        • Interestng. The other reply to my post actually described a worse experience than I had.

          Anyway, FWIW, my problems have happened over the course of several years, over multiple POP3 clients on multiple computers and internet connections. I just wanted to emphasize that it's not a flaky connection on my part or something, I dunno.

          I wouldn't call them horrible or anything... they're mostly-reliable :)
  • Yahoo states that this is so it can 'improve' service quality

    Hahaha, wotta joke. Everyone knows that charging money couldn't possibly 'improve' service quality! This is the Internet, running mail servers is free!

    Oh, wait, that was last year.

  • I've had a yahoo.com e-mail address for about three years now, and until recently it was my main e-mail address. At home I _always_ used a POP client to read my e-mail, and only used the Web gateway if I were on someone else's computer.

    The account's become almost useless lately, because I've been getting so much spam (Yahoo's filters only hold back a fraction of it), so I'm almost glad that Yahoo is giving me an excuse to close the account altogether. Softhome.net is much better.

    hyacinthus.
  • Novell runs www.myrealbox.com [myrealbox.com] as a demonstration of their e-mail products.

    It's free and you get

    Pop3, IMAP, SMTP
    10 Megs of space
    webmail

    all free, no ads

    I've been using the service for years and I don't ever remember it being down.
    • I'm not so sure about them.
      I read there agreemeny, and the bind me to a ten dollar fee for every pice of spam someone else might send me if they think I've used it as a drop box. They do not offer me a way to dispute the charges, nor do they tell me what I have to do to cancel the service.

      I was up pretty late, so I might hve missed something.
  • I have, and will continue to run my own IMAP mail server off my cable modem. It works well, it's blazing fast at home, I have complete archives (over 300MB of mail), no quota, and the mail comes directly to me.

    • Re:IMAP =P (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Cro Magnon ( 467622 )
      How difficult is it to set up an IMAP mail server? Currently I use fetchmail to retrieve mail from yahoo (which is my main e-mail acct), and this change bugs me! I use RoadRunner with my Slackware box.
      • It's pretty straightforward, but I would strongly suggest running a secure variant where the connection is SSL-encrypted. Do you really want to be sending your home system login and password back from the office in the clear?

        Courier-IMAP works well for that, if a little arcane on the setup at times, and it also requires Maildir instead of mbox. Not sure what your options are for mbox.
  • They want to charge people who use Outlook, Eudora, etc to read Yahoo mail.

    Charging for email is inevitable. These services require huge hardware infrastructures that have, to this point, been funded by the stock market. Going forward, you can expect the major services to charge...as soon as the little guys are out of the market (which is happening rapidly).

    • And supporting web-mail doesn't require the same infrastructure? Hell, the webmail probably requires MORE infrastructure since there's going to be more bytes transferred for the same message count. Why not just charge for Yahoo mail?

      • It's about convenience. Webmail is an easy way to pull in the casual users. Once those casual users start using e-mail more heavily, they'll be looking for more convenient ways to do e-mail. They also use the webmail to upsell to other services as well. This is the way most free e-mail services will be going - it's next to impossible to make money on webmail alone (I know, I co-founded nameplanet.com, and even at 1.7 million registered users the job of getting enough advertisers was horrendous).
  • I signed up for a spamcop email account a couple of weeks ago. I had been using Yahoo! but the amount of spam I had been getting increased dramatically over the past few months and their interface makes it hard to report spam.

    Spamcop is $30 a year, and I've been happy with it. Out of about 80 spams it let 3 or 4 slip into my inbox, and hasn't incorrectly detained any of them. The interface is pretty nice, but not perfectly smooth. I would recommend it to anyone who understands how email works.

  • Already good at filtering spam (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Malc ( 1751 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @12:38PM (#3200735)
    I've been using my Yahoo email address for 3-4 years. Their spam filtering is already pretty good. They add a "X-YahooFilteredBulk" header to a large proportion of the crap. I've been auto-forwarding my Yahoo account for a while. The first thing my mail server does is bounce any message with the "X-YahooFilteredBulk" header field. When I enabled that filter I went from 20 spams a day to about 5 a week.

    I could probably filter against .co.kr and get that even lower, although I have a couple of friends going to Korea next year to teach English. I can live with the levels of spam that's currently getting through my filters though. The numbers are small enough that I don't accidentally delete important messages.

    I only ever use their web interface when I'm away from home. So, I've had free email service with no advers from them for quite a while. I've been telling everybody how good it is that I have an address that never changes (I've lived in 3 countries in the last 6 years, and gone though about a dozen ISP, job and university email accounts in that time). US$20 for a year's service seems pretty reasonable to me for the amount I use the service, and the value for money I get and have had.

    Do I feel that they've let me get used to their service and get settled on it, and now they're taking advantage of my position? A little, but I'm not really offended. I could start telling everybody to email me at my domain address, but then my spam would probably start building up again. Of course, having my own domain might even keep my spam problem down through the use of a different alias for every place.
  • Fastmail [fastmail.fm] is a service that includes IMAP and Webmail in their free service. They also are about to drop POP3 from the free service. But, there's an option for a 1 time $10 fee for full access to SMTP.

    The best thing about it is, they're using Linux [netcraft.com]. :)
  • Before I started using the POP3 service, I left a lot of emails on Yahoo!'s server. Since then, I rarely have more than a few kB stored on there. When I'm forced to go back to non-POP3, I'll go back to leaving crap on their server.

    How does the cost/benefit work here? I would think that it'd be cheaper for them to handle a POP3 connection from me once every day or so than for them to store 10 megs of my crap and process 5-10 web accesses a day, but hey, I could wrong. But what if everyone does that?

    In the end, this is like GeoCities charging for FTP uploading, now to upload for free, you have to put up with their crappy File Manager uploader mutation. Why is it that they're charging for services that should be cheaper for them to provide? Convenience.

    -sk

  • Don't Need Pop3 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wafath ( 91271 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @12:46PM (#3200797)
    A while ago I wrote a Perl program to spider through my yahoo mail account and download my email. I had some reason to do it instead of just going to pop3, but mostly because I wanted to play around with it. The code is pretty damn ugly, but mostly because it is the first spider I ever wrote, and I was too lazy to look up nice examples. The programs can be found here [erols.com]. Before Yahoo started charging for pop3, the ethics of this were pretty straight forward. Now I will leave this as an exercise for the reader. (I think it is ok because I am still using their web interface for email, and I am just using this because I am an information pack rat. Your millage may vary.) W
  • I use Yahoo email forwarding all the time, so I guess I'm going to have to find a way around that (probably just drop Yahoo). The more important problem I see though is what about archiving email? My girlfriend insists on saving all nearly all the email that she sends or receives (aside from junk mail), which means every so often her 5 mb of web space fills up and we have to download it to her desktop. If you only need POP3 access once every year or so just to download and archive old email, you have to pay $20 for it? That's ridiculous.
  • I've got a free account with POP3, IMAP4 (5 MB storage), SMTP, HTTP & WebDAV (with 20 MB storage) all without advertising. Stable, reliable, (very) fast, without transfer limits, great interface. If I want to pay I can up my storage at $10/10MB per year to a GB. Oh, and their MIME settings are complete and properly configured.

    The only requirement is that one use a Mac (or Mac-claiming browser) to set up the account; it's at Mac.com [mac.com]. That said aside from certain administrative functions it works perfectly well from the Wintel & *nix sides too. Mail, web serving, WebDAV all are platform independent, indeed MS Windows 2K & XP include WebDAV clients that work perfectly with Apple's iDisk service.

    • um - BULLSHIT.
      I have a mac.com account, along with about a dozen other services, and mac.com is the LEAST reliable among them (yahoo, pacbell, hotmail, mail.com, etc). I'd say a full 50% of the time I can't even contact the mac.com server, and another 45% of the time, I can contact it, but it takes well over a minute. Mac.com has been nothing but a huge waste of time for me.
      • um - BULLSHIT.

        Well all I can say is I've rarely had problems. Last weekend there was an email outtage but that was the first I've ever noticed. As for the rest of it I've not heard of another free & advertising free host with the space, speed & services of mac.com. Your other examples all add taglines, require web interfaces, inserts ads, etc.

        Heck check out Internet Help Desk video (QT [mac.com] & WMP [mac.com]) and tell me any other free service would offer this unlimited bandwidth?

  • The old agreement for getting yahoo through POP3 involved marking a checkbox where you would agree to be put on more advertiser's lists so that Yahoo could get more revenue from spammers. What I think will really happen now is that you'll pay for them to "remove the spam"... yeah right! and it'll be the same as before with you $20 poorer...haha...

    I can't say too much though. I use USA.Net [netaddress.com] and they charged $30/year last year. Now they wanna charge for $45/year or $65/2yrs (members price) for e-mail. Thing is I want to have one non-isp dependent e-mail address so that people can always get ahold of me on e-mail. I also don't wanna host my own e-mail server (reliability), and I don't want to succumb to the borg [hotmail.com]. I gotta get my own domain!

    JOhn

  • What is needed from a for-pay mail provider. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sportal ( 145003 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @12:56PM (#3200879)

    Yahoo! are you listening: Here is what I want from a for-pay email provider

    As myself and other people start using more and more wireless networks [wirelessethernet.org] (specifically public wireless networks [freenetworks.org]), I have realized that there is no email provider that offers the proper services:
    • IMAP via TLS & SSL
    • SMTP via TLS & SSL with Auth - Allowing you to send mail from any return address after you have already authenticated
    • POP via SSL
    • WebMail via Full SSL (not just the login)
    • Allow you to forward your other email accounts to it
    • Allow you to send from a return email address of your other account (i.e. yourname@yourcompanyemail.com).
    • Fetchmail functions for automatic downloading of your other email accounts.
    • A reasonable amount of disk storage
    • The option to download your email for offline archiving
    If other email providers are listening or someone wants a quick business idea, start providing secure email services, and no Hushmail [husmail.com] doesn't count because the don't offer POP, IMAP or SMTP. And no I don't want to host this email on my home server like I already do. It needs to something that the mass populous can be referred to.

    Sidenote to the Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink and other top email providers. Please start requiring secure login protocols (no cleartext passwords). The average user is never going to click on that extra link for an SSL login page.
    • What about a shell account and SSH? I haven't used everything in your list but security was a concern of mine.

      I have had Unix shell account for the past 5 years that I pay about $5/month for.
      Accessing this shell account via SSH and using the port forwarding function would provide just about everything you would need.

      The shell provider supports IMAP, SMTP, POP, Fetchmail, Procmail, a web interface for email, and Squid.

      I use Putty [greenend.org.uk] (its free) in Windows to connect via SSH and forward over my local ports 119, 25, 110, 143, and 3128 over to the shell providers. For Linux I use higher local ports but to the same listed ports on the remote. Now I have an encrypted channel over all of these ports to my shell provider. Aside from being encrypted, it allows me access to all of these ports as if I was dialed into the provider or local on the providers machine. I can send mail as anyone (because I am considered a local user, its not relaying) to anyone. I can use IMAP with Pegasus (or Outlook and Eudora) on my laptop and keep the messages on the server, use the same on home PC but POP in to retrieve and delete. I prefer Pegasus [pmail.com] on Windows due to a better method of selecting profiles and can be changed on the fly, supports PGP, and its also free. Fetchmail gets and filters the mail from my normal dialup provider and any other POP accounts I have to the shell account. I can also use the providers news server and squid. At work, this would help me mask my browsing and downloading habits.
      Did I mention that I also have 10MB of space to store files that can be SCP'd over and a real live command prompt if needed?

      I believe this is about as close to an all in one solution that you will find.

  • ..that if they are going this route they had better stop sending me spam. I allowed them to send me spam ONLY because it was a pre-requisite for POPing my account.
  • http://www.emailaddresses.com/email_pop.htm
  • Fuck them. They already allow spam past their spam filters when it suits them (probably for kickbacks) - their service is slow, and unreliable. Often, some emails arrive without the content that the sender typed, and some emails just hang out on some server somewhere for weeks before the receiver gets them.

    I've been a Yahoo customer for 5 years, and if they start charging for their service, fuck them, I'm gone. I'll start using the accounts pacbell gives me with my DSL service.

  • can I pay 19.99.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by geekoid ( 135745 ) <dadinportlandNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Thursday March 21, 2002 @01:21PM (#3201093) Homepage Journal
    ..for a slashdot address?
    username@slashdot.org would be nice,
    or
    user usernumber@slashdot.org.


  • Yahoo mail is excellent. And a Yahoo ID (which is the same thing) gives me excellent access to teh features that Yahoo provides - Yahoo is one of the most useful sites on the net.

    Its worth 2 bucks a month. I drop more on donuts at Shipleys every week.
  • Also,
    Yahoo email is plagued with SPAM.
    it's not worth 19.99/yr. because of the SPAM.

  • We're moving toward a situation of large private monopolies providing our hitherto "free" POP-abble email. Of course as private companies they are able to change their terms of service. And, as they no longer have to make themselves as attractive due to reduced competition we have to accept that we'll be paying for Spam in the near future.

    All this is so that speculative investors can make a profit on the service that we all need.

    Here's a crazy idea: divert some of our taxes from military expenditure, slap some more taxes on speculative investment, and divert that revenue into providing a free, POP3 accesible , low memory account for every citizen.

    Don't like that idea? Don't like government providing public goods? Want to let the "Market" sort things out with its sweaty invisible hand?

    Then don't complain about Yahoo charging, that's exactly what's happening.

  • Last year, I signed up for their Personal Address service, where for $35/year, you get a domain that they host for you. Basically, it's an alias that points back to your Yahoo address. The thing is, you can have up to five addresses in your domain for that price. Not bad for mail hosting. Naturally, I got my mail using POP3. Now they want to pull this shit, and only a month after I renewed my subscription. I feel like I just got ripped off.

    I'm not going to cough up $19.95/year for this. I'll take my domain and transfer it to someplace like Stargate. At least they give me one POP3 address with domain registration. Are there any other registrars who will register a domain for a good price and throw in more than one POP3 mailbox with it that I ought to be looking at?

  • Yahoo has done well by me. The mail service has been really good about always being there, *never* losing a mail, service interruptions very rare, and as I recall, being due to DoS attacks more often than not.

    Even though I don't need the account any more as an 'on the road' kind of thing, since I got to the state of cluefulness to be able to deal with mail without the help of an ISP, I just don't mind making a small investment to maintain the service. In my opinion, Yahoo is one of the less evil companies around and so, here's my nickel.

    Another factor in this is... I don't mind sending mail with Yahoo branding, it's not nearly as embarrasing as say, showing up in somebody's mailbox wearing Hotmail noseglasses.

  • i've been using yahoo mail for 5+ years...

    this is the first I ahve heard about this.

    the funny thing is that I use yahoo only for the following services:

    mail.yahoo.com
    yp.yahoo.com
    maps.yahoo.com

    and absolutely nothing else. cant remember the last time I actually did a search on yahoo.
  • Now that people have come to rely on Yahoo mail, and the ability to download it into their POP client, Yahoo has them hooked. So they're gonna charge for this! Previously, the only hook to get you to upgrade to the "pay" account was teh extra storage, which you didn't need if you downloaded your messages now and then.

    Not that $20/year isn't a good deal- I've been using Yahoo mail because I can read webmail while travelling, then download it all when I get a chance. Plus, Yahoo is way more reliable than most ISPs' mail service- certainly moreso than Pacbell or Adelphia, which are so bad you can't rely on them at all- you really need something else.

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