Yahoo! Mail: history, connection and tips

Yahoo! Mail is an email service launched on October 8, 1997 by the American company Yahoo, Inc. The service is free for personal use, with an optional monthly fee for additional features. Business email was previously available under the Yahoo! Small Business, before moving to Verizon Small Business Essentials in early 2022. In January 2020, Yahoo! Mail had 225 million users.

Users can access and manage their mailboxes using the webmail interface, accessible using a standard web browser. Some accounts also supported the use of standard email protocols (POP3 and SMTP). Since 2015, users can also connect non-Yahoo email accounts to the webmail client.

The new Yahoo! Mail and most service accounts use yahoo.com as an email suffix. Previously, users could choose ymail.com ou rocketmail.com as a suffix or one of the country-specific suffixes. Many countries were available, such as yahoo.co.uk UK, yahoo.fr in France (also used by French speakers) and yahoo.it in Italy. Although these suffixes are removed for new accounts, they are retained for existing accounts. Yahoo! Japan Mail, a separate service, offers both yahoo.co.jp et ymail.ne.jp as suffixes. Internet service providers using Yahoo! Mail offer their own suffixes for subscribers, with AT&T also offering free accounts to non-subscribers.

History

1997 – 2002 Feet

Yahoo! struck a deal with online communications company Four11 for co-branded white pages. Marvin Gavin, who worked at Four11 as Director of International Business Development, said: “We've always had a bias towards being acquired by Yahoo. They were more enterprising than Microsoft. We had a great cultural fit – it made a lot of sense. Ultimately, Yahoo! acquired Four11 for $96 million. The purpose of Four11's acquisition was the company's RocketMail webmail service, launched in 1997. Yahoo! announced the acquisition on October 8, 1997, near the launch of Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! chose acquisition over in-house platform development because, as Healy said, “Hotmail was growing to thousands and thousands of users a week. We did an analysis. For us to build, it would have taken four to six months, and by then so many users would have taken up an email account. Market speed was critical. »

The transition to Yahoo! Mail hasn't been easy for many Rocketmail users. On March 21, 2002, Yahoo! eliminated customer access to free software and introduced the $29,99 per year mail forwarding service. Mary Osako, a spokeswoman for Yahoo!, told CNET: "Paid services on Yahoo!, originally launched in February 1999, have seen great acceptance from our active registered user base, and we expect this adoption to continue to grow. »

2002 – 2010 Feet

In 2002, the Yahoo! has been gradually redesigned. On July 2, the company's website was changed and it was announced that Yahoo! Mail and other services would also be redesigned. Along with this new design, new features needed to be implemented, including drop-down menus in DHTML, different category tabs, and a new user-customizable color scheme. Geoff Ralston, senior vice president of Yahoo! Network Services, said that

The launch of Yahoo! Mail Plus is part of Yahoo's strategic initiative to deliver premium services that deliver innovative, reliable and relevant services to consumers… In just five years, Yahoo! Mail has grown from one million to tens of millions of users, illustrating how consumers have made email an essential part of their daily lives. Thanks to Yahoo! MailPlus, Yahoo! continues to demonstrate leadership and innovation in providing consumers with the industry's most comprehensive and powerful messaging solution.

On July 9, 2004, Yahoo! acquired Oddpost, a webmail service that simulated a desktop email client. Oddpost had features like drag and drop support, right-click menus, RSS feeds, preview pane, and increased speed by using email caching to shorten response time. Many features have been integrated into a Yahoo! Email updated.

Competition

On April 1, 2004, Google announced its Gmail service with 1GB of storage, but Gmail's invite-only accounts kept other webmail services ahead. Most major webmail providers, including Yahoo! Mail, increased their mailbox storage in response. Yahoo! first announced 100MB of storage for basic accounts and 2GB of storage for premium users. However, soon Yahoo! Mail increased its free storage quota to 1 GB, before finally allowing unlimited storage. Yahoo! Mail had free unlimited storage from March 27, 2007 to October 8, 2013.

Since 2011

The September On December 17, 2010, Yahoo! presented a new Mail program to journalists. Codenamed "Minty", the 2011 version was announced on September 16, 2010. It included a new interface, improved performance, improved Facebook and Twitter integration, the ability to watch YouTube videos directly from an e -mail and improved search. Public beta began on October 26, 2010. In May 2011, the new Yahoo! Mail became the default interface. As the new interface became mandatory for users, some Yahoo! Mail reported slow typing speeds, contradicting Yahoo's claims of faster performance. Yahoo! offered no solution to the problem as of September 12, 2011. Users also missed the ability to paste text email addresses into the sender box. The new version has disabled the use of "secondary" addresses provided in the previous version. The new interface replaced the browser's right mouse button (making functions such as opening mails in new tab windows unavailable).

In 2013, Yahoo! redesigned the site and removed several features, such as opening multiple emails simultaneously in tabs, sorting by sender name, and dragging emails to folders. The new messaging interface was designed to provide an improved user experience for mobile devices, but was criticized for having an inferior desktop interface. Many users objected to the unannounced nature of the changes through an online message asking Yahoo! to bring back mail tabs with one hundred thousand votes and almost ten thousand comments. The redesign produced an issue that resulted in an unknown number of users losing access to their accounts for several weeks.

In December 2013, Yahoo! Mail suffered a major outage where around one million users, or one percent of the site's total users, were unable to access their emails for several days. Then Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer publicly apologized to users of the site.

China Yahoo! Mail officially announced its closure on April 18, 2013. Users were warned that all email, contacts, and account settings would be inaccessible unless users migrated to the US version of Yahoo! Mail. People who have created Yahoo! Mail in China during the Alibaba takeover had to create new accounts under new usernames.

In January 2014, an undisclosed number of usernames and passwords were leaked to hackers, following a security breach that Yahoo! claimed occurred through a third-party website. Yahoo! contacted the affected users and requested that the passwords be changed.

In October 2015, Yahoo! updated the messaging service with a "more subtle" redesign, as well as improved mobile functionality. The same release introduced the Yahoo! Account Key, a smartphone-based replacement for password logins.

In 2017, Yahoo! redesigned the web interface again with a "more minimal" look and introduced the ability to customize it with different color themes and layouts.

In 2020, Yahoo! added a feature to view NFL games.

User interface

Up to three web interfaces were available at one time. The traditional “Yahoo! Mail Classic” retained the availability of their original 1997 interface until July 2013 in North America. A 2005 release included a new Ajax interface, drag-and-drop, improved search, keyboard shortcuts, address auto-completion, and tabs. However, other features have been removed, such as column widths and one click delete-move-to-next. In October 2010, Yahoo! released a beta version of Yahoo! Mail, which included improvements to performance, search, and Facebook integration. In May 2011, it became the default interface. Their current webmail interface was introduced in 2017.

Anti-spam policy

Yahoo! Mail is often used by spammers to provide a "delete me" email address. Often these addresses are used to verify the recipient's address, thus opening the door to more spam.

Yahoo! does not condone this practice and will terminate accounts linked to spam-related activity without warning, resulting in spammers losing access to any other Yahoo! logged in with their ID under the Terms of Service. Additionally, Yahoo! points out that its servers are based in California and any spam-related activity that uses its servers could potentially violate that state's anti-spam laws.

In February 2006, Yahoo! announced its decision (along with AOL) to give certain organizations the ability to "certify" mail by paying up to a penny for each outgoing message, allowing the mail in question to bypass incoming spam filters.

Filters

In order to avoid abuses, in 2002, Yahoo! Mail enabled filters that changed some words (which could trigger unwanted JavaScript events) and word fragments into other words. 'mocha' was changed to 'espresso', 'expression' became 'declaration' and 'eval' (short for 'evaluation') became 'examination'. This resulted in many unintended corrections, such as "prreviewent" (widespread), "reviewuation" (review), and "medireview" (medieval).

When asked about these changes, Yahoo! explained that the modified words were commonly used terms in web scripting and were blacklisted to prevent hackers from sending damaging commands through the program's HTML function. Beginning before February 7, 2006, Yahoo! Mail ended the practice and started adding an underscore as a prefix to certain suspicious words and word fragments.

Gray list

Incoming messages to Yahoo! may be subject to delayed delivery as part of Yahoo's inbound spam checks. This may delay delivery of mail sent to Yahoo! without the sender or recipients being aware of it. The postponement is usually short-lived, but can last up to several hours. Yahoo! does not specifically document this policy in detail, although some information is available.

Controversies

Arrest of Shi Tao

In 2004, Yahoo's office in Hong Kong provided technical information to Chinese authorities on behalf of journalist Shi Tao, who was subsequently sentenced to ten years in prison for "leaking state secrets". Yahoo! was criticized by Reporters Without Borders for acting as a "police informant" to increase his profits. In August 2007, the United States Congress opened an investigation into Yahoo's handling of the matter. Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang testified before Congress. On November 6, 2007, the congressional panel criticized Yahoo! for failing to give full details to the House Foreign Affairs Committee the previous year, saying he had been "inexcusably negligent at best" and "misleading" at worst. Representative Tom Lantos described its leaders as moral "pygmies". Yang said that Yahoo! was no longer in control of its Chinese operations and was working with human rights groups to formulate a code of ethics for tech companies.

During a hearing in February 2006, the leaders of Yahoo! swore they had received no information about the investigation. Several months later, it was discovered that the document provided to Yahoo! China on April 22, 2004 by the Beijing State Security Bureau stated that "your office is in possession of the following items relating to a case of alleged illegal supply of state secrets to foreign entities".

On November 13, 2007, Yahoo! settled with Shi for an undisclosed sum. Shi was released from prison in September 2013.

Username Bans

On February 20, 2006, it was revealed that Yahoo! Mail forbade the word "Allah" in mail usernames, both separately and as part of a username such as linda.callahan. Shortly after news of the ban was lifted on February 23, 2006. Along with this action, Yahoo! also made the following statement:

We continually assess patterns of abuse in registration usernames to help prevent spam, fraud, and other inappropriate behavior. A small number of people signed up for IDs using specific terms for the sole purpose of promoting hate, then used those IDs to post harmful or threatening content to others, violating Yahoo's Terms of Service !.
“Allah” was a word used for these purposes, with instances relating to defamatory language. We have taken steps to help protect our users by prohibiting the use of the term in Yahoo! usernames. We recently re-evaluated the term "Allah" and users can now register for IDs with this word, as it is no longer a major target for abuse. We regularly assess this type of activity and will continue to make adjustments to our registration process to support a positive customer experience.

exploit

In November 2012, an exploit for Yahoo! Mail was sold for $700 by an Egyptian hacker, allowing hijackers to hijack Yahoo! Mail and redirect users to malicious website. The attack used cross-site scripting that allowed hackers to steal cookies. In January 2013, hacker and security researcher Shahin Ramezany pointed out another DOM-based XSS flaw that put 400 million users at risk.

Deleting accounts

In 2013, Yahoo! deleted accounts that hadn't been logged in for more than 12 months and gave those names to other users. This included accounts that had set up email forwarding to other accounts, who didn't notice and didn't act on the message to preserve their account. The fallout from this action resulted in some users losing access to accounts on other services, as their email resets were no longer forwarded to them, but to the new owner of their old account.

Phishing attack

Starting in 2007, Yahoo! was the messaging service used by New Zealand Telecom, which came under fire in early 2013. A spam and phishing attack that has been described as the largest to ever hit the country. Telecom and Yahoo! automatically reset the passwords of "approximately 60" users. In April, Telecom announced that despite the problem, it would retain Yahoo! as an email provider.

Account theft

On October 3, 2017, Yahoo! reported that all Yahoo! user accounts, approximately 3 billion, were affected by the account theft previously announced in August 2013. This update updates the December 14, 2016 announcement that more than 2013 billion user accounts were hacked in a breach that occurred in 500. Earlier that year, in September, Yahoo! announced that an additional 2014 million user accounts were hacked in XNUMX. The company reportedly discovered the breach that affected hundreds of millions of accounts years before their initial announcement.

Automated email content analysis

The content of Yahoo! Mail is scanned for targeted advertising purposes, unlike its main competitors Gmail (which ended the practice in late 2017) and Outlook.com (which did not use the practice).

Sharing content with the National Security Agency

In 2015, Reuters reported that Yahoo! had implemented a feature to scan all incoming emails for specific keywords and share email content in real time with the US National Security Agency.

Platforms

The mobile app for Yahoo! Mail can be downloaded from the App Store for iOS and the Google Play Store for Android. Both versions of the application perform the same function, but are adapted to the operating system of the mobile device. Some features include replying to a message by opening a notification and separate archiving, deleting and starring notifications. It is available in several languages.