Yahoo Mail blocked by outsourced spam defense firms
More subscribers to cagreens.org, greens.org, and gp-us.org mailing lists use Yahoo Mail than use any other email service provider.
Our subscribers post to over a hundred of these mailing lists through Yahoo Mail's web site. Those postings usually contain a few hundred characters of message that the subscriber actually wrote, and *tens of thousands* of characters of Yahoo advertising and formatting. The actual message is often less than 5% of the total bulk.
That is, when you send Yahoo Mail, you're sending tons of crap.
Many other subscribers to these lists use smaller, independent Internet services. Now that email is over 95% spam, these companies can't afford to develop and maintain their own spam defenses. So they outsource it. These companies' customers are consumers. They want it cheap, and they don't mind if some legitimate messages are blocked along with the spam. So these outsourced spam defenses are getting *very* aggressive.
Now, when the outsourced spam defense sees a message filled with tons of crap, the spam score goes way up. But if it came from Yahoo, they take some points off, because they know all Yahoo mail is full of tons of crap.
But when you post through a gp-us.org list from Yahoo, your message isn't coming from Yahoo any more. It's coming from gp-us.org, so the special crap discount for Yahoo senders doesn't apply. Some of this stuff is now spammy-looking enough that the outsourced defenses are rejecting it as spam. I'm seeing people getting unsubscribed from lists because their independent email companies are rejecting too much list traffic.
Yahoo Mail is becoming incompatible with the public email system.
Someone told me recently they think it's intentional. Yahoo wants to use its large market share to hurt other email providers. If that's true, it means the break-up of the public email system into proprietary corporate islands. But I think it's just a coincidence of accidents. Nvever ascribe to malice what can more easily be explained by...
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Because of my DSL account with ATT (don't get me started), I am actually a *paying* Yahoo mail user. Nonetheless, a couple of months ago, my webmail page changed for the worse, with the amount of advertising tripling, and including a lot of animated Flash movies, other kinds of flashing, etc. I complained, but of course it did no good whatsoever.
I switched all my online listserv and news subscription mail to a Gmail (Google) account. Google is somewhat better -- at least their advertising is text based (at least for now). I also like the way their mail discussions thread, instead of each email being a separate message. But their Contacts/address book features are sorely lacking.
Neither company is great on privacy issues or other Green values. For my personal and business mail, I use the ad free mail provided by my domain hosting provider, accessed through Thunderbird, a free email client that is M$-free as well.
In addition to Cameron's email addys, you can get one from Riseup.net, and I'll even give you a *@greencommons.org address for a small donation.
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If you call the phone company and ask who you can buy "DSL" service from, they'll tell you it's a monopoly. In most areas of the US, that's a lie.
Clinton-Gore's deal with the Baby Bells let them sell long distance service, but in exchange they had to rent space in their "central offices" (the building at the other end of your phone line) to competitors, who could sell Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Loop (consumer "DSL") over the telcos' wires. When they discovered the long distance market sucks, the telcos tried to wiggle out. They stopped building the kind of switching centers described in the deal. They started running optical fiber into the neighborhoods, and breaking them out to copper wire in small boxes called "micro POPs." In my neighborhood they're dark green, about the size of a bathtub, sitting on concrete pads. Where the weather is bad, they're in concrete vaults in the ground. Most residential DSL comes out of these boxes.
Eventually companies like Earthlink and AOL made deals to gain access to these micro POPs. These days there are lots of companies in them. Over most of the former SBC's geography, you can buy DSL service from Sonic.net, DSLExtreme.com, and many others. Most of them will match the telco's loss-leader introductory offers. Check broadbandreports.com to see what's available at your address.
not available in my area
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My favorite place for web mail is freeshell.org.
You have to be able to read and follow instructions and get help by participating in a user group. It's a cooperative, and your contribution is your participation, as described in Eric Raymond's famous essay "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way." So if you don't want to become computer-literate, and be part of a learning and teaching community, and a lot of Greens don't, then stay away. If your written English communications skills are poor, and that can be said of many native English-speaking Greens, then stay away. You have to log into your shell every couple of months to keep your account alive.
I've got the "ARPA level" account. The mailbox is accessible by POP3, IMAP, Secure Shell, and web-mail. You allocate your 800 MB among your mailboxes, shell, and web service. You get an account for life for a $36 donation.