The U.S. tech industry has largely declared it is off limits to scan emails for information to sell to advertisers. Yahoo still sees the practice as a potential gold mine.
Yahoo’s owner, the Oath unit of Verizon Communications Inc., has been pitching a service to advertisers that analyzes more than 200 million Yahoo Mail inboxes and the rich user data they contain, searching for clues about what products those users might buy, said people who have attended Oath’s presentations as well as current and former employees of the company.
The biggest news in this story is not that Verizon is a scummy company – but that 200 million people still use Yahoo’s email service.
It’s useful to have a free secondary address, even if just as a “recovery” address for the main one. I *certainly* wouldn’t use Yahoo! as my primary address, and I’ve long since killed off pretty much all the mail which was going there.
Chances are most of those users are dormant accounts, just used for collecting spam… That “rich” data will actually just be all the existing spam they’re receiving, which will compound the problem by creating the impression that more spam is somehow desirable.
Yep… I acquired mine after it got transitioned from a geocities account eons ago when Yahoo acquired Geocities… it’s basically been a spam-bucket account for fifteen years or more.
Likewise. The only thing I ever logged into Yahoo for was the Yahoo Messenger account I had tied into Pidgin since the days when it was called Gaim (which I abandoned when they killed off the API Pidgin used) and to administer subscriptions to a couple of fanfiction-related Yahoo Groups back in the mid to late 2000s… for which I sent the actual mail to my GMail account so I could consume it via IMAP.
Edited 2018-08-29 10:43 UTC
Their servers, their cost of maintenance…
Doesn’t everyone still have their old yahoo account kept around as their ‘spam’ account that you use for signing up for every sketchy site etc?
Since yahoo mail was already overrun with spam this seemed logical when moving over to gmail. The whole reason I moved to gmail in the first place was because gmail was free of spam and yahoo was full of it.
My yahoo mailbox is free of spam…must be how/where you used yours.