Yahoo! Mail turns 10
Yahoo! Mail celebrates its 10th birthday today. Or it would if it were, you know, a person and not a web-based software application.Anyway, 10 years ago today Yahoo! launched its webmail client. At the top you could get a whopping 3MB of storage. Now Google offers 3GB of free storage, while Yahoo! users get "unlimited" space for their messages.
A lot of things have changed in ten years. Spam wasn't much of a problem in 1997, and most people wouldn't think of attaching digital photos to e-mails because digital cameras weren't widely available.
Yahoo! has put together a little survey to find out how your e-mail habits have changed over the past decade. But we just have one question: do you still use Yahoo! Mail or has Google, Microsoft, or another service stolen your heart in the last ten years?
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
William said 4:43PM on 10-08-2007
Personally I've never really relied on Yahoo!'s services, perhaps because I'm too young(?). I relied on Microsoft's Hotmail in the "early years" but jumped on the "Gmail-wave" pretty early. I've never looked back since.
I did in fact try out Yahoo mail after I created my Gmail account, but I quickly left that account seeing that Gmail better suited my needs.
In my opinnion, Gmail is the name of the game...
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iamhoff said 5:22PM on 10-08-2007
I was a heavy Yahoo user (still am - 4 accounts and counting), but I checked out Gmail when I wanted to set up a new account and couldn't get the name I wanted. Now I have 3 Gmail accounts and switch equally between the two services. Granted, 2 of the Yahoo accounts have become spam throwaways over the 9 years I've been using them, but I still love it. And the new Yahoo Mail (no longer) Beta is great. I just wish the messenger client could be removed, because it often hangs up the IE boot process on me.
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Koolio said 6:09PM on 10-08-2007
I used Hotmail long long time ago but I got so much junk mails. I used Rocketmail all time time until Yahoo bought it. It was fast and easy to use. Yahoo then upgrade their system and have different out look. It's way too slow with anoying ads. Now, the only account I have is GMail. Gmail is way faster, clean, easy to use. The best of all, Gmail's spam system is the best. I use GMail to pull all my Yahoo email and it filter out all the spam mail that Yahoo left in my inbox.
I am now suggesting my company to switch to GMail SMB to have a better spam filtering.
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ToddZ said 8:45PM on 10-09-2007
Yahoo mail now has some nice stuff, but it's painfully slow compared to Gmail, and lacks the tags I've grown to love.
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kyoko said 10:48PM on 10-08-2007
I got my yahoo mail back in December 1996 (so, it is more like almost 11 years, and no, i'm not going to share my account here) I'm not sure who lied, but I know I didn't lie. I remember I got my yahoo account maybe around 2-3 months after they launched it and also before they merged with geocities. At that time, I also remember that they were offering POP account as well and suddenly, they took off the POP account offering and that is when I actively using my ISP (dial up) pop account. Year 1999-2000 (the year of alladvantage) I started using it again, and thankfully I still remember the password.
I'm still using that account, for YM and other things but not so much for mailing people.
on my other account that I don't care much, they have errors and such.
http://profiles.yahoo.com/nutell4
look at the "last update"
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Christina Warren said 10:52PM on 10-08-2007
I got my first HotMail account in seventh grade, or 1996, I think (though it may have been 1995) and I got a Yahoo! account at the beginning of 9th grade/1997. I used to do volunteer tech support with GeoCities, and when Yahoo! bought them, Yahoo! (I got 25 free shares of stock out of it and I cashed out in late '99 which made something I started doing out of boredom at 14 help buy my first car) - so I used the Yahoo! mail stuff on occasion, but HotMail was my web-based e-mail of choice (and even then, I've always preferred Outlook to web mail, especially after I bought my first domain in 2000) until GMail went into beta in 2004 (I was fortunate to get in pretty early because a close friend works at Google and was working on the project at the time). GMail is the only web-mail app that I've ever used for anything other than emergencies (well, at least prior to my first ISP POP account in 1996), but I still have that Yahoo! account from 1997 so that I can program my TiVo from their site if I need to do that.
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Christina Warren said 8:13PM on 10-08-2007
I got my first HotMail account in seventh grade, or 1996, I think (though it may have been 1995) and I got a Yahoo! account at the beginning of 9th grade/1997. I used to do volunteer tech support with GeoCities, and when Yahoo! bought them, Yahoo! (I got 25 free shares of stock out of it and I cashed out in late '99 which made something I started doing out of boredom at 14 help buy my first car) - so I used the Yahoo! mail stuff on occasion, but HotMail was my web-based e-mail of choice (and even then, I've always preferred Outlook to web mail, especially after I bought my first domain in 2000) until GMail went into beta in 2004 (I was fortunate to get in pretty early because a close friend works at Google and was working on the project at the time). GMail is the only web-mail app that I've ever used for anything other than emergencies (well, at least prior to my first ISP POP account in 1996), but I still have that Yahoo! account from 1997 so that I can program my TiVo from their site if I need to do that.
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james 42 said 10:59PM on 10-08-2007
Yeah, pretty much the same story here. Been there, done that with Yahoo and Hotmail, but am now with Gmail. I keep the others just for testing.
I have a regular Gmail account and have all my domains setup with Gmail as the mail server through Google Apps. This how I setup most of my small business clients when I create a new web site for them.
Thunderbird is a nice way to back up the Gmail accounts locally.
I am such a Google whore.
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michael said 8:48AM on 10-09-2007
It's awesome to see so many people jump on the Gmail wagon.
It's wonderful to have Google index your e-mail info for the so-called "sake of ads" isn't it?
I mean, who knows what else Google could do with our private data. I prefer not knowing.
I use Live Hotmail, and I have no spam. It works great, it's fast, and it does its job. I think people ought to try going back to the service that failed them in the first place, to see how much they've changed then.
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Stuart said 8:49AM on 10-09-2007
No yahoo mail for me until it can do threaded conversations like gmail and it gets rid of all those ridiculous graphic adverts. So far no web mail comes close to the clean uncluttered functionality of gmail.
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bienvenunet said 9:27AM on 10-11-2007
I have used the same Yahoo email account as my primary email account for about 8 years now. I have no intention of using anything else. I pay the $25/year for Yahoo Mail Plus so that I don't have ads and I don't have that G-company indexing my personal information. My SpamGuard is well-trained so that spam is but a minor annoyance. My main beef is that Yahoo hasn't capitalized much on its once-superior integration in recent years. Also, Yahoo doesn't yet have online applications. Hopefully the acquisition of Zimbra will change that.
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Susan said 2:31PM on 10-11-2007
I used to get more spam with Hotmail, but now I hardly get any. The new Hotmail is great.
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George M said 2:27PM on 10-20-2007
I used to think that Yahoo!Mail Plus ($20/year) email service was a much better alternative than Gmail, but my opinion is now the opposite after my recent experience with Yahoo: they lost 6 continuous weeks of ALL the emails sent to AND from my account during 2006. I lost hundreds of emails, which I was informed were “corrupted”. I learned this after repeatedly reporting the problem to Yahoo Help (4 email exchanges on same topic with Yahoo’s “help” staff, all save the last resulted in the same false “problem solved” form-letter reply). The final insult was Yahoo’s proposed solution - that I contact the senders and recipients of my lost emails and ask them to send me a copy of each correspondence.
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George M said 2:11PM on 10-20-2007
I used to think that Yahoo!Mail Plus ($20/year) email service was a much better alternative than Gmail, but my opinion is now the opposite after my recent experience with Yahoo: they lost 6 continuous weeks of ALL the emails sent to AND from my account during 2006. I lost hundreds of emails, which I was informed were “corrupted”. I learned this after repeatedly reporting the problem to Yahoo Help (4 email exchanges on same topic with Yahoo’s “help” staff, all save the last resulted in the same false “problem solved” form-letter reply). The final insult was Yahoo’s proposed solution - that I contact the senders and recipients of my lost emails and ask them to send me a copy of each correspondence.
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