Sunday, January 26, 2014

Death of Yahoo




Yahoo

Dear Customer,
This is a courtesy notice that Your incoming messages were placed on pending due to your email has exceeded limits and require to be validate within 24 hours. You are advised to Sign in to Yahoo to Verify your account immediately to get your mail working.


*Important: In general, domestic data usage will be reflected within 24 hours.


Thank you for using Yahoo! Mail.


Yahoo!©2014
_____________________________________________

This obviously fake message has appeared in my Yahoo! inbox for weeks.   Even though I flag it as SPAM, it keeps re-appearing. 


 Yahoo! is on the skids, and it is not hard to understand why.   The portal that the major online players (Google, Hotmail, and Yahoo) use to snag users, is often the free online e-mail.  At one time, Microsoft's Hotmail (or MSN mail) was the major player.  Yahoo had a decent service, too.   But Google has done the best job of integrating its mail service with online storage, photos, social networking, and the like.

Yahoo?  It's like they just gave up.

Yahoo is the AOL of today - in the sense that having a Yahoo address sort of marks you as an AOLamer.   Yahoo is notorious as the source of all sorts of computer viruses and trojans.

The typical pitch is like the one shown above - a poorly worded come-on with an embedded link for a "sign in" that takes you to a Russian website which downloads the redirect virus to your computer - and sends out SPAM e-mails to all of your friends.

What is disturbing is that these e-mails appear in my inbox and not in the junk mail box - or that they appear at all.  Gmail and Hotmail do a far better job of just deleting this crap and not allowing it to propagate across the Internet.   Yahoo apparently does nothing.

And this is why the scammers are so bold - they don't bother to even change the message between sendings.   They don't have to worry about some Yahoo SPAM filter taking the message out, as Yahoo apparently has no spam filtering at all.

Yahoo is notorious for the most lax security on the Internet, and it is not hard to understand why.

I noticed this recently only because I am closing my Yahoo account.  I had kept it alive as an alternative account, and as a backup in case Google starts doing more weird controlling shit.

But frankly, I think I would go to a pay e-mail service before I would go back to Yahoo - a pay e-mail service that, unlike Gmail, isn't trying to delve into my life all the time.

But all that being said, Yahoo is going to peter out, if they can't get the basic stuff right.   If you are offering an Internet portal, the stuff has to work.   And Yahoo e-mail just has the air of an abandoned website, at this point.