Yahoo passwords compromised?

[Mike Anderson]

My wife and I have both received multiple emails in the last 24 hours from friends or family with Yahoo addresses, not just Todd Clinesmith's. They all contain links to crap websites. I have to conclude there has been a breach in Yahoo's security.

I know it's a pain to abandon an email address everyone knows you by, but there is something seriously wrong with Yahoo. I have found them to be registering and hosting spammers' websites among other issues. I have a good friend who can't forward email to me from his Yahoo account - they are blocked and cannot be sent. They have some security policies like this that make NO sense, and others that are obviously lax as hell.

Folks, consider Gmail. They have excellent security, good spam filters (you almost never have to look at a spam email), and if an address is compromised because you gave the wrong person your password, you just abandon that account and open a new one. You can attach up to 20MB at a time to a single email, and store up to 10.1GB of mail. With Gmail you are automatically provided access to Youtube accounts, Picasa image sharing accounts, and Blogger. Yahoo = grief. Sorry, but it's true.

[Calvin Walley]

i have been using yahoo ever since there has been a yahoo i guess , i would hate to switch now . i love the yahoo tool bar ..google is frustrating for me to use because i am so used to yahoo,s tool bar . i have never had a problem with yahoo mail

[Richard Sinkler]

I had a problem with Yahoo mail where I was getting hundreds of emails bounced back to my mailbox from addresses I know I did not send anything to, and they were ALL sent to different Hotmail addresses. This went on over a coarse of a couple of weeks, and changing my password didn't help. So, I went to Gmail and have been a happy camper ever since.

[Dave Potter]

and if an address is compromised because you gave the wrong person your password, you just abandon that account and open a new one.

That would never happen, far as I'm concerned. I give NO ONE my passwords. Period.

But, on the topic of free web-based email - I've never thought it was a good idea. Like most other "free" things in life, you get what you pay for.

Does it work? Sure. But the dirty little secret is, all the freebie web-mail providers, hotmail, gmail, yahoo, yada, yada, are there to make money, and the ways they do it are often not apparent to subscribers. Using them leaves you out in the open, and you have no control over how they use your email traffic. I just don't trust 'em. I use them strictly as a last resort.

My ISP provides us multiple POP email addresses as part of our service, and I trust them not to misuse my email. Been using POP mail, with email clients like Mozilla Thunderbird, for nearly 20 years now. I dabble with the "free" stuff only out of curiosity, and only when security is not an issue, and that means, very little.

[Mike Anderson]

Dave, that is a wise approach. Any business mail, anything that requires real security, I go thru my ISP account on Thunderbird. Gmail is for fun.