December 1, 2003: No Yahoos For Yahoo

We experimented for a while with putting our company mailing lists on Yahoo! We have now finished migrating them back to a mailman server on our own network, largely due to complaints about the spam Yahoo! added to messages. Some people didn't want to have to join Yahoo! at all, and I just got a reminder of why. The Yahoo!-spam in my mailbox parsed to:

"We know you told us not to send you e-mail, but we're changing our system, so now you'll get LOTS and LOTS of e-mail about our services unless you opt out AGAIN. Letters and phone calls, too! Whoopee!

So I used my Yahoo! login, for the first time in months, and found their opt-out page. I had to click FIFTEEN TIMES to opt out of physical junk mail, phone calls (!!), and 13 categories of e-mail spam.

No THANK you, Yahoo!.
-- Steve Jackson

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