Dear Yahoo,
You have never listened to any feedback I've ever sent you; you have never respected my privacy; and you have never cared, so frankly, I don't expect you will now. You used to have one redeeming quality: you put out the one decent email program left.
Gone, gone, gone. As of today gone.
Not only am I required to downgrade to the BROKEN version of Mail that I kept telling you was broken and I wouldn't upgrade to until you fixed certain very nasty bugs, but with it, I am now required to let you rifle through all my mail and read it and use it to target ads to me that I will never click on. Unless there was a way to export my entire decade's worth of mail, which of course, there isn't.
Not only am I required to let you read my mail to make ads, you have moved the ads to the side so that I am required to never be able to move a blinking ad out of my line of view.
Not only am I required to downgrade to your lousy idea of an upgrade, but it's because you aren't supporting Classic anymore. Guess what? I didn't need support. It worked, unlike this new mail that only works if I have Messenger, chat, and photo slideshows active, which I hate and will never, ever, ever, ever use except to delete the spam messages you force me to have to look at.
Not only am I required to downgrade to the new Yahoo! Mail, but I'm required to use the Full Version I don't want because the Basic is so broken you can't even click "Previous Email."
You now have no redeeming qualities. And I still can't export all that mail that I need to keep handy since I used my email as a hub of operations before and now don't know how I'm going to hub without it.
No love,
the scribbler
P.S. Whoever invented infinite scrolling should experience ten levels of purgatory for making it cryworthy to try and clean up 14,000 emails in an attempt to actually see the number of emails in my inbox in the header.
I am in the same boat as you. I didn't even like Yahoo Mail Classic when they added those damn sub sections ex: news, chat, etc... If I want those I'll go to a news site or chat site, or download trillian or something.
There are a few things you can do. I have been contemplating it for some time now. First thing - you can block advertisements from showing. Download the firefox web browser and install adblock plus add-on. Gets rid of most advertising on the entire internet. One problem out of the way.
Next thing - you can transfer your e-mail via IMAP protocol. It's not too difficult. Download the free e-mail program called Thunderbird. Set it up with the correct info and you can download all of your messages including attachments to your computer so that you now "own" them in a sense. You'll have to ask Yahoo how to do this - but they say in this page that you can. http://help.yahoo.com/kb/index?locale=en_US&y=PROD_MAIL_CLASSIC&page=content&id=SLN8519
Once you've downloaded your e-mail - you now have a copy on your computer and still have not agreed to Yahoo's TOS - which I know is out of the question. So that's half way though the problem.
Now you have to decide what to do. You can use another e-mail service like gMail (which also scans e-mails, by the way) and import all of those messages into gMail by way of thunderbird... or... You can buy a domain name, have a hosting provider that you pay (some are cheap - $1/month) to host an e-mail server for you under the domain. Slightly more expensive - but as you are paying for the service, there are no ads, etc. You can access this e-mail via a free e-mail user interface (it will vary slightly depending upon what you select) to access your e-mail on the go -- or use Thunderbird if you've got a laptop or something like that always with you. And of course you could import all of your messages to that e-mail server and be assured privacy - as it's your domain and you are renting server access from an ISP. Now you'd only have to concern yourself with court ordered subpenas, etc. Just don't forget to renew the domain each year!
I hope this helps give you a few options to consider. I'm considering the exact same thing.
Best.
I could not agree more with every word you posted about Yahoo mail. It's maddening that they think their new product is any better than the old one (which I have had for over thirteen years) for those of us who use Yahoo for email and nothing else. Ever. Not chat, not news, not photos. I'm annoyed, so I thought I would vent to you. I'm good now, thanks!