Yahoo used to be one of my favorite e-mail providers some times back. Free SMTP, free POP3, an excellent address book, usable filters and all the works. Then the corporate greed entered the picture.

Let's analyze Yahoo as an e-mail provider blow by blow. To say that these guys are oversubscribed would be putting it mildly. There is no way you can subscribe on their servers with a decent nick. All the good ones are taken. In the end you end up with a nick that looks like your name, address & your telephone number rolled into one. It's almost embarrassing passing out an e-mail address like that.

Yahoo is probably the most well recognized name on the Internet these days & this is also their downfall. Yahoo mail is a favorite amongst spammers. Even with the Junk Mail filters on, the amount of junk that gets through is amazing. And most of this Junk certainly does not belong to the benign chain mail type forwards. I mean my e-mail account seemed like the home page to the Penthouse web site. I never realized that there were so many beautiful ladies out there willing to do unmentionable things to me. Why can't I find one of these in the real world? I'm not complaining, these mails did wonders in improving my carnal knowledge, but then there are times when you seriously have a headache.

Then of course there is the problem with the taglines. Yahoo attaches an irritating tagline that says "Do you Yahoo?" to the end of every mail that passes out from their SMTP servers. I have no problem with taglines but "Do you Yahoo?", that almost sounds like a pickup line. If you're using Yahoo as your corporate e-mail account then expect to receive a mail with a tagline that says "You've been served!".

The web interface is pretty usable but there is the question of that irritating immortal cookie. You login, check your mails & then when the job is done you press the logout button. You're logged out, right? Wrong!! Up comes a page saying "Pssst Bro!! You seriously & completely wanna log out?" or something to that effect. Huh, isn't that what i just did, buddy? Deja-vu!!

Recently the ads being put up by Yahoo seems to have started increasing in size. Either that or I've been bitten by a radioactive spider & now am a proud owner of microscopic vision.

Then Yahoo also has this habit of sending you reminders about the great services that their partners offer & asking whether you would be interested in signing up for their programs. All these mails originated from the same e-mail address, so it was quite easy to set up a filter automatically delete these mails.

All this was made tolerable by the fact that Yahoo provided you with free SMTP & POP3 services. These were pretty basic SMTP & POP accounts with no fancy security features like APOP, MD-5 CRAM authentication features, but it was still OK because seriously speaking I'm no James Bond & my mail isn't usually that private. I mean, anybody taking the trouble to hack into my account probably deserved to read my mail. For the totally uninitiated, POP3 & SMTP services allow you to check & send your mail via an e-mail client like Outlook Express & Eudora. Now, I don't move around much & access my mails from home. Besides I have about four e-mail accounts. Now, checking these e-mail accounts online one by one on my metered dial-up account turns out to be a bit expensive. This is where the mail clients came in, I could download my mail from all my mails within a couple of seconds, log off, read them & compose the replies at leisure & send them off whenever I went online.

Everything was hunky-dory but then; as Zack De La Rocha so eloquently puts it; "came the shot". Yahoo decided to charge for the use of their POP3 & SMTP servers. Well, I guess these guys have a business to run & have to charge for the services that they provide & you got to pay for what you get & all that moral stuff. But for me it boils down to principle of things. I like getting my kicks for free. There are a gazillion free POP3 & SMTP providers around which provide this service without the hundreds of hassles that come along with a Yahoo mail account. Even in the web interface department , yahoo is no great shakes. There are millions of other webmail providers that are faster & generally hassle free.

Since then I've moved on to GMX. These guys provide excellent e-mail service, with webmail, POP3, SMTP & everything. Their POP3 accounts even support APOP & MD5-CRAM authentication. Only catch, the pages are in German. :) But don't be disheartened, if you don't know German. There are others like Totalise & Activatormail that also provide you with a webmail & POP/SMTP accounts.

If you're looking for a webmail account, try Rediffmail or Operamail. These sites are not very graphics oriented & as a result load very quickly, even on a measly dial-up connection.

I did like Yahoo mail once upon a time, these days I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.



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