Starting from today Yahoo will be moving users from older versions of Yahoo Mail (including Classic) to the new Yahoo Mail. “After that, you can access your Yahoo! Mail only if you upgrade to the new version,” says the official Yahoo Mail ‘help’ article. When you ‘upgrade’ you will have to agree to a new Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
Scroogle you
The new agreement between Yahoo and you, the mail user “includes the acceptance of automated content scanning and analyzing of your communications content, which Yahoo! uses to deliver product features, relevant advertising, and abuse protection.”
People who don’t want ads targeted at them will be able to opt out of the “relevant advertising” feature mentioned above, through the Yahoo Ad Interest Manager page in their mail options. Also you won’t see contextual ads if you use a dedicated IMAP email client. However Yahoo will still be automatically scanning through your emails for the other purposes delivering product features and abuse protection.
If users are unhappy with the changes and don’t agree to the changes in policies then users only have one option; to close their account. Yahoo reminds people that an IMAP email client will be able to download previous messages, should you choose this nuclear option.
The new Yahoo Mail and existing Gmail email scanning works in pretty much the same way and people have been happily using Google’s service for quite some time, though it is common knowledge that Big G looks in your emails to help target ads at you. All this must help pay the costs of providing the “free” email service. A popular free alternative, the Outlook.com email provided by Microsoft, doesn’t indulge in this behaviour now and it looks like it couldn’t be implemented for a number of years as it is very publicly poking fun at Google for “Scroogling” people’s private emails amongst other things.
Yahoo Mail was overhauled and upgraded last December with a new web interface and new apps for various mobile platforms but no one was forced to change over. A lot of Yahoo Mail users in the UK will be moving away from the service this summer as BT recently announced it will be dumping Yahoo Mail in favour of its own home grown service for its broadband customers.
Will this policy change prompt any readers to abandon Yahoo Mail?
