Unlimited storage, it’s coming!

Posted May 14th, 2007 at 9:50 pm by John Kremer, Yahoo! Mail

 299 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

As promised, we’ve started to roll out unlimited email storage to Yahoo! Mail users worldwide today. When it hits your account, you’ll notice the storage meter has disappeared — meaning, you just don’t have to worry about deleting old messages ever again!

As a reminder, while we wish we could simply flip a switch and “unlimit” everyone at once, we’ll be rolling this out over a few months to facilitate a smooth transition. Thanks for your patience.

Happy emailing!

John Kremer
Vice President, Yahoo! Mail

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299 Comments Add your own

TheAnand | May 15th, 2007 at 1:35 am

Thats good news, I was kind of getting worried about my account reaching 30%……THANKS !

Tim | May 15th, 2007 at 4:47 am

Will this go out farm by farm or something else?

BJ | May 15th, 2007 at 6:05 am

I received an email on May 3 announcing the pending roll-out of the unlimited storage enhancement.

One particular item in the email has drawn concern: “Additionally, within the next few weeks you will begin seeing graphical advertisements in your AT&T Yahoo! Mail service.”

I’m not currently an AT&T Yahoo! subscriber (though, I used to be), but have been a Yahoo! Mail Plus subscriber for a number of years.

I do not wish to have advertising in my email, as this is a service I pay for.

I’m hoping I received the email in error and that it’s intended for AT&T Yahoo! subscribers and not Yahoo! Mail Plus subscribers.

raffaell | May 15th, 2007 at 6:13 am

Thanks, but my yahoo account right now full with spam….i dont know why this is happening…….everyday i check my mail, i have to cleanup some spam….

I hope its will be better soon

destoller@hotmail.com | May 15th, 2007 at 7:00 am

Who gives a rats behind about unlimited storage for yahoo email accounts when Yahoo terminates your account without notice and does not adfvise of its intent to terminate the account. No due process and then to boot you lose whatever you stored in that account… BEWARD of their business tactics Yahoo SUCKS! If yahoo wants to respond, please do… they don’t give any links to reach them to discuss any problems… just spew their commpany policy to “Banish you forever”

Manas | May 15th, 2007 at 7:30 am

Excellent news !!!

Y Mail rocks.. :)

alex | May 15th, 2007 at 7:51 am

my question is i’m from latin america i have 1gb the we is going to change right i hope it will be soon thanks for doing this i really looking forward to test it

mohanraokotari | May 15th, 2007 at 9:28 am

xllent services, than q

Jeremiah Owyang | May 15th, 2007 at 9:30 am

Thanks for doing this, I’m approaching capacity as I don’t want to delete anything. It would be great if Yahoo could discuss how data is being secured, backedup, and other privacy concerns.

While I’m sure you’re doing a great job doing this, we’d love to hear how it’s being implemented.

G. Chai | May 15th, 2007 at 2:09 pm

I wonder who’s complaining about free 1 GB limit? Since you’re in the process of getting rid of that limit, I hope you will consider increasing the number of filters…and giving POP access to everyone. Yes, even to non-Plus users.

John Kremer | May 15th, 2007 at 5:25 pm

Thank you for your comments about the rollout of unlimited email storage. I wanted to address a few of them in particular. The feature will be pushed out to users around the world over the coming months to ensure everything goes smoothly. The rollout will be faster than “farm by farm,” but unfortunately, due to the complexity of our infrastructure, I can’t share the details of which users will receive the feature first.

If you are an AT&T Yahoo! Mail customer, you may have heard about our plans to introduce graphical advertisements into the email experience. To clarify, we will not show any ads within your email messages. Also Yahoo! Mail Plus will remain an ad-free experience.

We take security and privacy seriously and there is useful information for consumers about protecting their passwords and data at http://security.yahoo.com. In addition, we offer tools such as the Sign In Seal, to help users protect their accounts.

As always, if you have additional questions or comments about the product or need customer care assistance, please visit http://help.yahoo.com/mail and click on the “Contact us” link.

Fred | May 15th, 2007 at 6:40 pm

It’s good news really, but can Yahoo! set the priority higher on problem of lots of spam mails, not only on the storage size issue. Thanks.

=bg= | May 15th, 2007 at 6:52 pm

so, will deleted items remain in ‘trash?’

jon | May 15th, 2007 at 9:19 pm

this is fantastic, thank you

Rajesh Anandakrishnan | May 15th, 2007 at 10:14 pm

This is a good news John Kremer.

Yesterday: Free Mail : Hotmail was a revolution in 90’s
Today: Wow Mail : Yahoo, Live & Gmail
Tomorrow: Unlimit Mail: Yahoo!

Read More, I have blogged on this:

http://www.suggestusability.com/2007/05/yahoo-mail-unlimited-storage-its-coming.html

Mike | May 16th, 2007 at 8:32 am

I won’t hold my breath. Wasn’t it in February that they said they were going to roll out the integrated into mail IM client and I have yet to see it. Don’t know if that got shelved because of problems or they have that big of infrastructure that it takes that long to roll it out. I’m not really a yahoo basher I pay for mail plus and find a lot of yahoo’s services to be top notch. Just wanted to post my $.02 since it seems there is a yahoo rep reading this..

TheAnand | May 16th, 2007 at 9:32 am

@destroller, I think yahoo! is doing a great job of customer care…i have been using them for more than 7 years now…whenever i have approached them with a problem, the response has been simply super and the problems are usually solved in a single mail if you are clear enough…i love yahoo for their products and for ther service levels…even though i am only a stingy free mail user….

Baldusi | May 16th, 2007 at 2:44 pm

I’m a paying customer of the US service. If I could get IMAP4 access, I would dump most other mails save my business addresses.

Andrew | May 16th, 2007 at 4:10 pm

I have been a loyal Yahoo! Mail user for well over 6 years now, and love the service, reliability, and ease of use. The interface’s design is also much more intuitive than any of the other web-mail providers.

I have enjoyed Yahoo! Mail so much that I have upgraded to Yahoo! Mail Plus. I just have one question. One of the main perks that Plus Mail users had was their giant 2 GB of storage space. But now that everyone’s account space will be unlimited, will there still be distinguishable features that separate Mail Plus from regular Mail so that it is still worth the $20 annual fee? How will Mail Plus be different from Mail in the future?

Thanks!

Rajesh Anandakrishnan | May 16th, 2007 at 6:11 pm

HI John,

I could able to see few promotions news about the yahoo mails new feature. What about the file size of attachment?. Is that going to be same or any difference in size?

Yahoo! Mail User | May 16th, 2007 at 8:20 pm

I’m still sad we don’t have disposable email addresses for free.

= … O (

Yahoo!’s AddressGuard features are WAAAYYYY~ better than Gmail’s unlimited number of disposable email addresses. If the spammer’s smart, they’ll drop the “+word” and spam you at your original Gmail email address. PLUS, Gmail’s “+” is not recognized in many places, but Yahoo!’s “-” IS!

I don’t want my email address to end with, for example, @yahoo.fr just so I can use unlimited AddressGuard/disposable email addresses.

= … O (

Eragmus | May 16th, 2007 at 9:06 pm

I am so sorry, but GMAIL FTW!!!

Gmail’s superior to Yahoo Mail in nearly every way. Yahoo, you see this and so try to imitate Gmail (and Google in general), but that is all you are… a cheap imitation. Google innovates, while Yahoo copies. Pretty simple, really.

Gmail > Yahoo Mail

toomuchgreentea | May 16th, 2007 at 9:07 pm

@Mike
Many have used the integrated chat and love it! I myself use it daily. Maybe it just takes time to have all the “farms” updated so they’ll be ready for this new integration.

IKhan | May 16th, 2007 at 11:29 pm

Its great news

picciu | May 17th, 2007 at 7:45 am

Is a good ideea ! Thank you !

Al Mun | May 17th, 2007 at 12:17 pm

If you want to stay in the game you must localize the interface of the e-mail accounts (translate it into various languages), maybe also add a spellchecker for each language. Also you must localize the search engine.

shyam | May 19th, 2007 at 2:39 am

im using 91% of mail box plz come fast ………

Jesh | May 19th, 2007 at 2:55 am

Hi,

I found that some of the users who switched to mail beta recently were having messenger also integrated in the mail beta but what about the users switched earlier. How can i upgrade to new mail and messenger version of yahoo beta. Pls any body reply to my email id.

Jesh.

jaanss | May 19th, 2007 at 5:02 am

i need unlimited storage mail

Kiran | May 19th, 2007 at 5:10 am

Hi All,

Nice to hear the good news…..

Kiran
dotndot.com

mudafer | May 19th, 2007 at 6:05 am

thank u

Aamir | May 19th, 2007 at 10:00 pm

Cool…
I always wanted it…
So when does it come to India??

Kabeer | May 20th, 2007 at 4:00 am

Thank you very much. It is a great thing? only two days ago I started deleting unwanted mails in order to provide free space. Congratulations! May the Great Gods blessing in plenty be on the Yahoo team

Raghu | May 20th, 2007 at 8:09 am

Unbetable offer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thnx a lot.

nishant | May 20th, 2007 at 9:51 pm

hay thanks u have done a exellent job

Vishal garg | May 21st, 2007 at 1:22 am

Excellent News….!!!!!

now we dont need to delete our old mails….. but i wanna ask when you are going to strat POP3 services in yahoo….!!!!

again congratulation!!!!!!

Regrads… vishal

john | May 21st, 2007 at 6:13 am

ya have seen you r webside so i agree with yo r terms and condions

UAP National | May 21st, 2007 at 7:12 am

Just to inquire if Yahoo! Mail unlimited is now available since my storage meter is already 97%. I am an avid Yahoo user since 2004. Temporarily, I registered with GMAIL in case such move is yet to be confirmed. However, i will re-transfer to Yahoo as soon as the Yahoo! Mail unlimited is available. I love Yahoo! so much and I hope I can benefit such great offer. Regards and More Power to Yahoo!

David Hobby | May 21st, 2007 at 7:55 am

Thanks much for such a user-friendly gesture. I am sure you will build a lot of stickiness with unlimitede storage.

I have a bit of a gripe about Yahoo! Email Beta and supported browsers. I use Safari (the latest version) which is far and away the most popular Mac browser.

Yet, when I log into my mail I have to wade through the “unsupported browser” screen every single time. That’s 15 seconds of my life I’ll never see again. Every time.

If Yahoo! is unwilling (or unable) to support the most recent version of the most popular browser for Mac, could you possibly cut us a break and not browbeat us about switching from what is actually an excellent browser every single time?

Please, please, please.

It is very customer-unfriendly and very unlike Yahoo! to insist on doing it.

Either supporting Safari or just letting us get to old e-mail without the gruffy doorman would be far preferable to the current situation.

Thanks,
David

Dave | May 22nd, 2007 at 5:42 am

You haven’t addressed the SPAM problem. I receive over 500 spams a day. I keep using the spam button, but the same spams (with different made up return addresses) keep ariving.

My question is this:
Why can’t Yahoo filter spam based on the actual message content, not just by return e-mail address?

Also, how big of an attachment will we be able to send now that storage will be unlimited. 10g per message these days doesn’t cut it.

Also, you may want to post an actual e-mail that we can use to contact Yahoo directly instead of using this blog.

Thanks for your service.

Dave

M | May 22nd, 2007 at 8:47 am

As someone with a well filter 61% email account, I think this will be right on time.

If beta ever picks up speed, that would be great. (Until then, I’ll just stay with my 61% classic version.)

Tina Young | May 22nd, 2007 at 12:38 pm

This is fantastic! I can wait. I always liked yahoo but now I can’t ever foresee leaving it. But like someone said here, what about a direct e-mail to yahoo for this….maybe you could inform us of some of the order/areas that will go unlimited first over the next few months. So I’d have a better Idea of when this is likely to happen to me. Will It be a paid for service??
Thank you again. Tina

Dave | May 22nd, 2007 at 7:58 pm

Again I ask, how big of an attachment will we be able to send now that storage will be unlimited. 10meg per message these days doesn’t cut it. Will we be able, let’s say to send a couple of home movie files and some mp3s, or will it be still limited to 10 meg total per message?

shibin | May 23rd, 2007 at 1:40 am

Hooooooooraaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy I GOT UNLIMITED STORAGE

Ramesh | May 23rd, 2007 at 9:12 am

It’s very nice to hear, b’cz I have more than five ids in yahoo. all the five are reached 1gb. please make it fast. very proud to saying that I’m a yahoo user.

Donna | May 23rd, 2007 at 9:22 am

I got mine today. Thanks a bunch!!

Carl DiLorenzo | May 23rd, 2007 at 11:51 am

Your ads on my PAID MAIL SUBSCRIPTION page are outrageous/ You have taken over 1/3 of my mail page and have no given me a rebate in my monthly fees. This really sucks. YOAHOO How greedy can you get?

Kay Clark | May 23rd, 2007 at 12:24 pm

What the HECK!!! Why do I have advertising all over my Yahoo email. I pay too much…$20 per month to have this email service. I don’t understand WHY I am paying to see advertising. This is TOTALLY annoying. I’m shopping around for another service!! How rude of YAHOO!!

FFFFF | May 23rd, 2007 at 8:17 pm

Unlimited storage is FREE?
What about the “graphical advertisements” in your AT&T Yahoo! Mail service. What a sellout! I suppose we are not valued customers anymore, but rather “marketing opportunities” for AT&T Yahoo! to exploit! YahooThinksItSucks!

Vaibhav | May 24th, 2007 at 1:06 am

Please do it fast(as soon as possible).

Ahsan Iqbal | May 24th, 2007 at 6:40 am

Wowwwwwwwwww! That will be really amazing if I’ll be able to get UNLIMITED mail storage. That will also ve really nice if I can use my Yahoo! Mail account as a back-up storage devicce. I want to ask that is it OK, legal and allowed to use Yahoo! Mail account to store back-ups of our important files?

X | May 25th, 2007 at 10:03 am

Will we be able to send unlimed attachments?

jules | May 25th, 2007 at 2:01 pm

AS a business client I find it absurd you place ads there .

give me back my monitor space and why should i pay anything if its unlimited now ?

my 2 cents

jules | May 25th, 2007 at 2:04 pm

okay if you want a better email –

A) let me forward messages without opening.
B) stop all spam

C) come on those nigerian letters and v1agra ads are easy to spot as well as those fake watches

D) let me mark / flag emasils with 3 -6 symbols and autosort by symbol

needs response
save
priority
long term project
etc
etc

Nicki Dugan | May 25th, 2007 at 2:08 pm

@Dave and X – All e-mail messages will have the same attachment limits as before… 10MB for free users and 20MB for Plus users.

John Daniel | May 25th, 2007 at 3:26 pm

I subscribe to Yahoo Mail Plus which is supposed to have 2 GB storage space. However, I was surprised to note that my account shows only 1 GB space, which is available with your FREE email service. So, what’s my advantage of paying $19.95 per year for Yahoo Mail Plus?

John Daniel

The Beatles | May 26th, 2007 at 12:20 pm

Can’t Yahoo spot those Nigerian letters and Viagra ads as well as those fake watch ads and singles wanting to meet me. (My wife doesn’t appreciate it… and neither do I).

I keep getting them over and over and OVER AGAIN!

I can’t have my kids check my e-mail because of all this crap!!!!!!!!!!

If Yahoo is ONLY looking at the spammer’s e-mail address, this is hopeless as they keep using different fake e-mails everytime.

LOOK AT THE ACTUAL CONTENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This spam is getting old REALLY FAST!!!

The Beatles

celeron | May 26th, 2007 at 3:12 pm

I should be much more happier for POP acces for free version of yahoo. i only still keep yahoo account for messenger.

sankaranand | May 26th, 2007 at 11:57 pm

Well everything is ok about the unlimited storage but when you guys have stated that “Store limitless photos, messages ”
which means you give unlimited storage even for storing photos although i heard the news that yahoo will switch the yahoo photos to flickr so the flickr users will have a unlimited storage ?

though i am a flickr pro account holder i have this silly doubt that will the unlimited storage influence the flickr uploading bandwidth ? if so what about pro account holders ?

Lucy from the other side | May 27th, 2007 at 9:50 am

I’m also pretty upset that Yahoo only looks at the e-mail return when blocking spam.
I keep getting the same spams over and over again.

Clique | May 27th, 2007 at 10:07 pm

How are you going to deal with message content spam. Yahoo only blocks the e-mail address. I get so many of the same spams that I’m contemplating getting out of Yahoo mail.

Marguerite Jasmin | May 28th, 2007 at 7:48 am

Yes it sounds impressive but I’m still at only 44% of my 1GB and I can’t remember the last time I deleted an email. How about increased attachment size (and speed) splitting up a 15MB file just so I can send it via email should be a thing of the past!

vera gensan | May 29th, 2007 at 1:07 am

When do I get to benefit from it?

My email addy box is already near the brim. It is now 70% full.

I normally don’t delete so many of my emails because i find value in these even 10 months later.

I hope I receive it soon.

I have been with Yahoo since 2000.

roderick | May 29th, 2007 at 1:19 pm

i love it and i already have unlimited mail but i think yahoo should only give it to people who are running out of space becouse i have never went over 1%

Stacy | May 30th, 2007 at 12:34 am

As a paying subscriber to sbc yahoo! internet service I am becoming more and more despondant over the service that I am receiving.

I just opened up my email (beta interface) to find that a large portion of my already too small mail interface has been completely obliterated by ads.
It is bad enough that the entire right side of the screen is taken up by that towering advertisement, but now there are ads taking up half of the space on the lower left (immoveable, I might add) dock where all folders are.

Now, you might not think this to be that big of a deal, but remember: with yahoo mail beta there is no way to simply select or multiple select and move mail from one folder to another by clicking on a ‘move’ button. Of course, Yahoo has been saying for the last 8 months that it was working on that capability and it would be out shortly.

But I digress….
I have aproximately 15 personal folders for mail sorting in that left hand pane. In order to get mail from my inbox (or any other box) into the desired folder, I have to drag and drop it.

Now that there are the ads, I’m finding it virtually impossible to move my mail around to my lower folders. By the way, the ability to add subfolders would be fantastic.

Back to my original point.
I understand the need for yahoo to fund it’s business by padding non-contextual ads into FREE yahoo mail accounts, but I am EXTREMELY ANGRY that I am a paying customer and I have to put up with this crap!!!

According to my ruler, I now have exactly 632 pixels in which to view the “from, to, subject, date, flag, spam, and size” partitions of my email.
That does not work for me.

I also have to scroll in many emails now, as well.

Here’s the kicker….. I have ad blocker so YAHOO, YOUR ADS ARE WASTED ON ME! I CAN’T EVEN SEE THEM!!
The only thing that you are accomplishing is pissing off a lot of people that have put trust in you to deliver at least a competitive, if not superior, product.

Way to go, yahoo!

NOT!

Stacy S.
A very irritated consumer.

Richard | May 30th, 2007 at 7:18 am

Still no sign of the Integrated Messenger function which was promised to be available to all several weeks ago. Otherwise Yahoo Mail Beta is wonderful!

Joshua Sawyer | May 30th, 2007 at 10:02 am

Thank you yahoo I can’t wait. I think everybody should try the beta service. It will be nice to have all the space, because I will be able to use it for a lifetime.

Sweet | May 30th, 2007 at 11:14 am

hey everyone this is destoller@hotmail.com again i just wanted to say that i take back my remarks against yahoo, their services had been great but i was a retard and didnt open my email for 6 months and they deleted my very important documents that i didnt look at for six months. but what the heck i am pretty slow in the head.
send me some mail
destoller@hotmail.com

gahgah | May 30th, 2007 at 7:48 pm

ok. y did mi old email address get y-mail IM and unlimited storage and mi new 1 got NOTHING USEFUL???

I KNOW ITS ABSOLUTELY NONE OF MY BUSINESS, BUT THAT SUX!

James | May 30th, 2007 at 9:04 pm

So basically what you are saying is that my $40 per month for DSL service is not good enough. If I want an ad free email client I will have to shell out another $20 per year for yahoo mail plus?

Looks like I’ll be shopping around for a new provider for all of my combined services, that’s over $100 per month from just one subscriber.

Way to go AT&T and Yahoo.

Ann | May 30th, 2007 at 10:04 pm

Thanks for the unlimited e-mail storage. However, I don’t appreciate receiving advertisements in my
e-mail account. I’m paying for e-mail service and NOT for unsolicited ads. I believe Yahoo has made a poor business decision by inundating e-mail acounts with blinking graphics and advertisements. Hopefully, consumers whose ISP providers utilize Yahoo mail will cancel their accounts and go elswhere.

I’m in the process of identifying another ISP provider in order to transfer my e-mail service acount. AT&T and Yahoo — good riddens. You don’t own this market!

Jason | May 31st, 2007 at 1:02 pm

This is pure rubbish, Yahoo!

It’s one thing to bombard free Yahoo users with ads, but PAYING users??? Are you SERIOUS?

Also, I highly do NOT appreciate how you just close accounts with no notice and without ability to receive your info FROM your account. You have poor managing skills, Yahoo! Very poor!

Turn on account rsqviper RIGHT NOW!!

Manoj | May 31st, 2007 at 2:49 pm

you have no idea how much happy i m hearing that news…
i love yahoomail…
it will be fun with unlimited space with yahoo….

Roxann | June 1st, 2007 at 9:49 am

i need it quickly, my mail is already 75% so thank ya very much.

John Kremer | June 1st, 2007 at 10:05 am

Hello again. I wanted to address a few more comments from you about Yahoo! Mail.

We are in the process of rolling out integrated instant messaging to users of the Yahoo! Mail beta. If you are a beta user, stay tuned; it’s coming very soon.

Many of you have asked about how unlimited email storage impacts Yahoo! Mail Plus users. Of course all Yahoo! Mail users will receive unlimited storage, but keep in mind that people upgrade to our premium product (Yahoo! Mail Plus) for many reasons, with storage being just one of them. Yahoo! Mail Plus users also enjoy no graphical ads, bigger attachment limits (20MB), enhanced spam protection, AddressGuard/disposable addresses, POP access, mail forwarding, and premium customer support.

As always, if you have additional questions or comments about the product or need customer care assistance, please visit http://help.yahoo.com/mail and click on the “Contact us” link.

Please also be sure to see my previous replies in which I address ads in AT&T Yahoo! Mail, Spam, Speed and Anti-abuse Limits.

Thanks,
John Kremer

lisa | June 2nd, 2007 at 2:58 am

Thank you for offering this. I have to wonder…why did you roll it out to FREE customers before paying customers (Yahoo Plus)? How is this an incentive to keep paying?

Bill G***s | June 2nd, 2007 at 9:19 am

John,
You STILL haven’t addressed how you will be dealing with the spam problem, meaning catching spam by the message CONTENT, not just the return e-mail address.

Most spammers use a fake return e-mail address which changes with each message sent. The content of the message itself remains the same.

RESPOND to this concern NOW will you!!!!!!

Bill G***s

Russ | June 2nd, 2007 at 7:38 pm

I have to agree with the folks who have complained about the ads in the AT&T Yahoo. One would imagine that the 50 or so dollars spent each month on DSL would also include an ad-free email experience. However, I now find that my (still in beta) email UI is cluttered with a large vertical ad on the left and annoying panels on the right above and below the folder list. When I received notice that the interface would start containing ads, I thought they’d be somewhat unobtrusive links at the top and bottom versus full vertical panels. I now find I like the old UI better since the ads aren’t quite as annoying.

momo | June 3rd, 2007 at 4:19 am

i have an e_mail at yahoo from 6years and it have the same space so any one send me the soultion on my e_mail my e_mail is momo_momo_ccc@yahoo.com thaaanks

Anil NATHANI | June 4th, 2007 at 6:09 am

Dear Yahoo,

It will be really nice if I can get un-limited storage, as I use Yahoo regularly.

Thanks in advance,

Anil NATHANI

Senthil | June 5th, 2007 at 12:54 am

Its really nice news…
Most of the time i keep on deleting mails ..
Now its really useful to have an yahoo account..

But still i didn’t get the unlimited storage , messenger…

when will it be upgraded…thanks in advance..

Keep rocking Yahoo Team…

-Webrsk

Jagadeesh | June 5th, 2007 at 4:22 am

its very good news for me

John Kremer | June 5th, 2007 at 5:01 pm

Bill G***s,

We certainly know that spammers have been forging email addresses for many years. In fact, this is precisely why we invented DomainKeys, which was just standardized by the IETF as Domain Keys Identified Mail. Yahoo!’s SpamGuard uses a variety of techniques to keep the spammers at bay — including examining the content of messages.

We appreciate your feedback on this, and hope that you will continue marking those spam messages that arrive in your inbox as spam. That information is invaluable to us in updating the filters, and tracking the bad guys’ latest tricks.

- John Kremer

Jim Del Favero | June 6th, 2007 at 10:56 am

As a product manager for another silicon valley company and a yahoo ATT DSL subscriber, this new ads in the email issue provides great fodder when talking to my team about how to generate more revenue off of your customers.

A great example of what not to do. Put ads into a service that customers pay for, and do it in a way that degrades their experience.

Create ads that look like navigational elements, buttons, and aren’t targeted to anything. Make those buttons take up enough space to create a vertical scrollbar that further reduces horizontal space. Also put enough fake ads (buttons) so that many of my folders are now below the ‘fold’ so to speak.

Advertise for products I already have to make sure it creates the maximum feeling of being hosed, like new free ATT cellphone, uh I already have one of those.

Large vertical skyscraper on the right so now I can’t see the date column on my emails, awesome who thought of that genius move?

So now I had to move all my emails into the inbox, which caused yahoo mail to choke, download them all into my desktop client. Delete all my folders and go about changing all of my bills and other items to point to a different email account.

it will take a few weeks, but soon enough i will be using an email service a I pay for about as much as I use hotmail.

Nice work in helping Google to grow their userbase.

Bob | June 6th, 2007 at 9:19 pm

John Kremer

I join the affray in objecting to the proliferation of ads in the e-mail interface (they are everywhere, like bad guys in a low budget horror movie!) This really is unfair to inundate us with so many invasive ads. They are everywhere, top-left, bottom-left, right side, in your face mostly! It has really taken the joy out of e-mailing. If my email service was free, I could perhaps understand the ads, but I am a paying customer via my AT&T DSL internet service. Please rethink this decision. Thanks for considering my complaint.

.

Tim | June 7th, 2007 at 8:40 am

Stated above in the June 1st post by John:

“Also Yahoo! Mail Plus will remain an ad-free experience.”

DSL subscribers are listed as having a mail plus account under their services etc. However in my area some people I know that have these accounts are getting the adds. Is this just a glich or something else? When one person chatted with tech/customer support they advised there was nothing they could do. Is this correct?

Bill G***s | June 7th, 2007 at 1:51 pm

John,

I keep marking the same messages over and over and over again for weeks at a time. When you see this over and over and over again, why won’t you just block the message as per the exact same content?

I see not one bit of reduction in my inbox (over 600 spams each day).

Bill G***s (*ate*)

S. Chuck | June 7th, 2007 at 4:11 pm

The new ads will drive me away as a paid subscriber soon. If I pay for something, I expect at least some privacy. The ads are everywhere, and the banner side ad is 1/6 the page which makes navigation difficult especially since I pin the favorites to my left screen side. I call B.S. This is a money grab. Way, way too intrusive. It is one thing to stick free users with ads, but paying customers??? Very bad marketing strategy. So I pay for this but am driven to consider a more privacy respectful email domain. Good move. The “new att”, right.

Brian C | June 7th, 2007 at 4:52 pm

Mine is still at 12% of 2GB. I’m not to worried; I’ve been using yahoo mail for years so I have plenty of space but I am looking forward to knowing that I will never run out of space.

Any chance of IMAP for premium subscribers? I would really appreciate this and I am sure many other premium users would as well. The beta is nice but still not the same as being able to use a mail client and pop doesn’t cut it for me because I need the ability to also access my emails online through the web client.

Thanks,
Brian

S. Chuck | June 7th, 2007 at 4:55 pm

Mr. Kramer,
One other point. To the extent that these ads are unique to the “ATT Yahoo” experience, then Yahoo ought to give serious consideration to the damage this is doing to the market perception of Yahoo. Indeed, as we speak I am on the phone with ATT/Yahoo trying to figure out if there is a way to upgrade my way out of this advertising h*ll.

S. Chuck | June 7th, 2007 at 5:20 pm

Mr. Kramer,

This is the stock response on line chat customer service provides:

“We apologize for the inconvenience. The advertising is a needed step towards providing world class service at an affordable price.”

WORLD CLASS SERVICE?????

S. Chuck | June 7th, 2007 at 5:42 pm

Mr. Kramer,

Truly, I believe this to be a world class marketing gaff. Mr. Del Favero’s post, above, states the problem succintly. I might sound flippant, but in fact I want to remain an ATT Yahoo susbscriber with the option to opt out of the ads. I am brand loyal but if ATT/Yahoo doesn’t respond constructively, then as each unhappy customer is marginalized, erosion of your hard fought customer base will accelerate. Google must be smiling all the way to the bank.

Maureen | June 7th, 2007 at 5:49 pm

I used to enjoy the visual “peace and quiet” of my email, but now it’s filled with really annoying advertisements. Please get rid of them!

Matt | June 7th, 2007 at 5:51 pm

Personally, I love the ads. As a Premium Mail SBC/Yahoo! subscriber for 4+ years, I have turned down multiple offers to go to Comcast for phone and cable modem service which would result in a more streamlined billing process. But, I try to be a loyal consumer and SBC/Yahoo! provided a very high quality service and I stuck with it.

Loyalty is awesome. I never thought I would be this lucky, but now, unsolicited, I have the following:

1. Ad “buttons” that look components of my mailbox in an apparent effort to trick me into clicking. This is a solid example of Yahoo! innovating.

2. Mail that loads even slower. I never thought I would get this. In fact, I never even thought to ask. Thank you for building in features I did not even know that I wanted. This enables me to stare into space for a few extra seconds with each email that I send. Thank you for that.

I need to get back to my Inbox so I can see all the other new “features” Yahoo! has sent me.

ArtB | June 8th, 2007 at 3:11 am

The ads in the beta client are completely unacceptable. I too have been a loyal Yahoo user. I loved the Beta interface, i loved the speed, everything was great. That has all changed.

Now, if someone glances at my screen when I’m using Yahoo Mail, it looks like I’m looking at po-rn with all these obnoxious ads everywhere. My $39.99/month for DSL was a steep price to pay for internet service, but I figured it was worth it because I had this nice email client. That is no longer the case.

I’ve already begun the process of archiving my emails and putting them into MS Outlook.

I have noticed, like someone else before me, that if you “switch back” to the old yahoo mail, the ads arent as annoying…. BUT THE BETA CLIENT WAS SO MUCH BETTER.

Big mistake, Yahoo. You are going to lose a lot of customers over this.

Joe | June 8th, 2007 at 7:41 am

I just got the update this morning. I am very upset with the “graphical advertisements.” Not only have they added a 2 inch bar on the right, but have added smaller ads all over the place. I feel personally betrayed by ATT Yahoo for doing this. I spend a fair amount of money every month on internet and feel that I have paid for an ad free experience.

I hear google calling my name……

S. Chuck | June 8th, 2007 at 8:25 am

Yep, a day later and I’m still aghast and angry at this move. So absent a constructive response from Mr. Kramer et. al., we’ll know that they have no intention of listening to their customer base. Sure, ATT/Yahoo will get ad revenue and can trumpet that to shareholders (I wouldn’t buy now). But they’ll lose brand loyalty, users will begin flocking to Google as the default search engine, use gmail, hotmail or whatever, and Yahoo will lose more in search engine market share than they will ever see in the piddling amount of revenue they’ll get out of spamming their own customers right where they shouldn’t. Email. This ought to be a violation of the CAN-SPAM ACT.

Would love to hear Mr. Kramer’s response, but I suspect we won’t get one.

Gustavo | June 8th, 2007 at 8:55 am

Take the horrible ads of old people and wrinkles off my email. It sucks. Not happy. You are taking away my screen space and replacing it with eye sores. No good.

Ann | June 8th, 2007 at 10:23 am

I have been a customer so long my domain is pacbell.net

Count me in as another subscriber who is intensely irritated by these new ads. First of all, I don’t need unlimited storage, I am at 5%. What I need and EXPECT is ads-free email. I could understand if it was a free account, but it isn’t. I have been paying for this service for 8 years and have put up with a lot (none of which you could call “world class”). I do not want to deal with the hassle of changing my address, but if they don’t rethink this policy, I may finally have to do it.

Gary L | June 8th, 2007 at 10:37 am

I have blasted Yahoo mail with complaints all this week. They answer that “while Yahoo is indirectly connected to these ads, I should forward my complaints to the advertisers”.

What BS. They must be rolling in the ailes.

Gary L

NOT John Kramer | June 8th, 2007 at 1:48 pm

You tell us to mark inbox spam and press the SPAM button. My spam increases.
What in the $%#^@&$& are you doing with all this incoming spam? If even ONE comes into your nerve-center, it should be blocked right away!

STOP ALL OF THIS FREAKIN

SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM 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SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM 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SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM

NOT John Kramer | June 8th, 2007 at 1:49 pm

The above represents the number of spams I get EVERYDAY!!!!!!!!

S. Chuck | June 8th, 2007 at 2:16 pm

Paging Mr. Kramer,

We all deserve the courtesy of a substantive, material response. It doesn’t matter whether Yahoo is obligated by contract to ATT, because both companies are being tarred by the same brush. PLEASE, favor us with a response. You asked for comments, you got them.

roxanne m. | June 8th, 2007 at 4:11 pm

How about for the freelancer who works online and with email 15 hours a day, and to add to the struggle has ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder): he or she now has to endure additional stress on focus components by hypercorrecting that focus every time he or she goes to the inbox–has to force the consciousness to overrride, ignore, bypass…to essentially do another level of conscious filtering OUT of junk–explotive, undignified crap.

What a mess greed brings to the already overburdened PAYING, LOYAL users, and how those ads contribute to mental erosion.

Wonder how many lawsuits will arise from this intrusive and unacceptable ad inclusion strategy?

roxanne m. | June 8th, 2007 at 4:13 pm

And…, ironically, the warning at the bottom of this very posting window says that if you weild spam, you will be banished forever!!?? Should the cop be exempt from wreckless driving laws?

Arafath | June 9th, 2007 at 12:21 pm

i saw in my friends yahoo mail os unlimited storage. currently my e-mail box is going to be full i dont like to delete the mails of the mails i need that the reason i would like to know how can i make my e-mail inbox unlimited storage

Brian | June 9th, 2007 at 11:11 pm

John-

I’m so glad to hear that I’m not the only paying user that’s shocked by and complaining about the new ads in the email browser. Lose the ads or lose another customer. I will not pay more to remove the ads.

Hitesh | June 10th, 2007 at 9:24 pm

Dear Yahoo!

I am still living with 1GB Mail Storage.

What should I do to get this facility?

Please reply

Regards,
Hitesh
India

Chi | June 11th, 2007 at 12:04 pm

I am a long time paid AT&T/Yahoo customer. I am currently using Yahoo Mail Beta as well. Last week, everything changed. The advertisement are showed up on the right side and took up about 1/8 of the page. Chat feature was added, which I don’t use. The folders area on the left have strink, so now I can’t see many of my folders unless I scroll down. When I’m composing an email, the advertisement space turn to hint, which I don’t need. And from what I read here, I’m suppose to get unlimited email storage(which I don’t have) because of all these changes. I called customer service several times and all they give me is the same BS “this is to provide you with quality service.” I guess Yahoo and AT&T have a different opinion than the rest of us about quality service. I’m switching back to regular mail and if they mess with that too, Bye Bye Yahoo, Hello Google. And you know what, I might just pay Google for it.

Alanna | June 11th, 2007 at 2:07 pm

all I can say is YA HOO!!!!!!!

sd dietz | June 11th, 2007 at 5:46 pm

Thanks to the spam ads I have had to go back to my original model. Use Yahoo mail as a daily filter and use Outlook as my client. The Beta client was superior, fast and usable prior to the Intrusive sidebar ads.
I can live with some ads, but when they were changing every three seconds I had to go back to the original client. At least its ads do not use up desktop space.
I too thought as a paying ATT/DSL high end customer I would be marginally exempt to such treatment. I guess not.

SDD

Disrespected DSL Customer | June 12th, 2007 at 10:02 am

Mr. Kremer,

You can add me to your growing list of PAYING customers (DSL) who are outraged by the addition of annoying graphical ads to my email.

If you want to bombard users of your free email service with ads, bomb away. But, to punish your long term, loyal, paying customers with incredibly annoying and obtrusive ads is seriously disrespectful.

Do you actually expect people to pay you money to be disrespected?

LOSE THE ADS, OR LOSE ANOTHER PAYING CUSTOMER!!!!!

Most Sincerely,

Disrespected

andyo | June 12th, 2007 at 1:42 pm

[...]Yahoo! Mail Plus users also enjoy no graphical ads…
[...]
Please also be sure to see my previous replies in which I address ads in AT&T Yahoo! Mail, Spam, Speed and Anti-abuse Limits.

Comment by John Kremer – Jun 1st, 2007 at 10:05 am

I would like to know where are your other replies, please.

Various Yahoo Mail Plus users who are paying $20 a month (which is not the fee for AT&T Yahoo DSL) have already complained about the ads. Is this a mistake?

I am an AT&T Yahoo DSL customer, and I’m also extremely annoyed at the ads. But if I was a Yahoo Mail Plus customer, who opted to pay because he was told explicitly that there would be no ads, and then get not only some, but many extremely annoying ones, I would be supremely p1ssed.

andyo | June 12th, 2007 at 3:00 pm

I think I was just censored. I wonder why, it wasn’t that bad. Certainly up there are some worse ones.

I also was complaining about the ads, and was pointing out that what the author said about the yahoo mail plus accounts not having them is not true. Several people with those accounts have already complained. I am not talking about ATT yahoo, but yahoo mail plus. I also have ATT yahoo, and I think, while I’m very annoyed as a paying customer, that yahoo mail plus people, who paid for explicit no-ads mail, would and should be much more upset than I am.

andyo | June 12th, 2007 at 3:02 pm

weird, the previous message appeared when I posted it, then when I came back it wasn’t here, refreshed many times and still not here. Posted the second message, and now both are there. So I apologize for implying censorship.

BDD | June 12th, 2007 at 9:53 pm

Yahoo Hostage!

Yahoo forces customers to pay annual fee to remove unwanted email page ads

The addition of ads to a paying customers email site with no way to request its removal constitutes spam. The shear volume of email page consumed, detracting from productivity of email processing, along with the inability to request it to be removed, is the definition spam. The addition of an advertising bar containing spam as well as every other free area being filled with spam is annoying to the users and counter to good customer service. The consumption of large areas of my email page and the additional bandwidth consumed is unwanted and slows other internet access.

Please stop spamming me immediately.

The fact that I must now pay to stop this practice (EMAIL PLUS) is equivalent to being held hostage. Internet blogs and local news stations are already starting to blast this practice. “YAHOO HOSTAGE” is not a slogan I would want my company to be associated with. Again, general public opinion considers this advertising approach to be spam. Allow those with a concern to remove, those that do not express concern can continue to receive the ads.

The blogs are already sharing numerous ways to filter/block the ads. ( i.e. Mozilla adblocker add-on). They are also enlisting support to send an email blitz of negative feedback to the advertisers. So each advertiser on the email page will receive volumes of negative feedback and few positive responses driving down their customer good will.

Why not reverse this practice before a large wave of negative customer feedback starts to eat away at the Yahoo AT&T credibility and customer good will.

Causing your loyal customer base to unite against a bonehead marketing policy seems very irresponsible.

Please suspend sending SPAM material consisting of non-requested , unwanted materials to my email application. It distracts from productive email use, negatively affects performance, consumes valuable computer resources, is annoying, and undesirable.

As I plan to use every means possible to block these ads and would not contact one of these advertisers even if the product offered was of stellar value; they are completely useless to me.

Tim | June 13th, 2007 at 3:22 am

The advertisement for Plus still list no graphical adds: http://mailplus.mail.yahoo.com

Doen’t seem right to me.

Larry Schwarcz | June 13th, 2007 at 7:00 am

Hi John,

I noticed that in addition to the “unlimited email storage” you’ve now started displaying ads on the e-mail web pages. I’m sure you’ve seen other posters who are less than happy about this. We were all sold on the AT&T DSL solution with “No Graphical Ads” as one of the selling points. I poked around the AT&T web site on Sat, June 9, 2007 and found this link:

http://www.att.com/gen/general?pid=7301

On it, it says one of the standard features is:

Enhanced email – AT&T Yahoo! Mail PLUS at no
extra cost with 2 GB of storage, POP access
and email forwarding

So, I then went to the Yahoo! web site to see the features of Mail Plus and found this:

http://mailplus.mail.yahoo.com/

No graphical ads
We’ve removed all graphical ads from the Mail
Plus pages, so your experience is even more
enjoyable. You will not see any third party ads
either.

Both of these links are still active as of today (June 13, 2007).

When I call AT&T to complain, I’m told that they’re getting so many complaint calls that they’ve been told they can’t escalate them to tier-2 support any longer! And, all of the customer service reps tell me AT&T is only providing me my link to the net. These ads are put there by Yahoo! But, when I call Yahoo! customer support, I’m told that as far as they’re concerned, I’m not a paying customer (we all pay AT&T for our service, not Yahoo! directly).

So, what’s the scoop? When will Yahoo! do the right thing and REMOVE THOSE ANNOYING ADS? All of us AT&T DSL customers are PAYING for no ads!

Thank you,
Larry.

P.S. Being a moderated site, I would be very surprised if this even gets published. After all, it has useful content!

clarence p | June 13th, 2007 at 9:18 am

PLEASE stop all of the ads. my beta email page is covered with ads. I am paying for this service snd should NOT be required to try to move the ads out of the way…………..
clarence p

Another Lost Customer | June 13th, 2007 at 9:23 am

Add me to list of extremely peeved AT&T Yahoo DSL customers.

Per AT&T’s website: “Enhanced email – AT&T Yahoo! Mail PLUS at no extra cost…”

Per the Yahoo Mail Plus site: “No graphical ads**
We’ve removed all graphical ads from the Mail Plus pages, so your experience is even more enjoyable. You will not see any third party ads either.”

According to these descriptions, I should see no ads. What gives?

I agree with the other posters- If it were a free account I wouldn’t care. But I’m paying $35 a month for the “Elite” DSL package, which is quoted as being “ad-free”. Apparently that doesn’t count anymore?

It wouldn’t be such a big deal if the ads were small and unobtrusive. These ads are just outright annoying though! Mine has been stuck on some stupid wrinkle ad since this whole mess started! (I definitely won’t be buying that product!)

I couldn’t care less about the unlimited storage. Some may need it, but I’m consistently around 10% of my 2 gig limit.

ATT/Yahoo needs to get this situation under control fast- before they lose even more customers. I’ve been looking for an excuse to switch to another provider. ATT/Yahoo may have just provided one.

Sincerely,
Another Lost Customer

Rob Becker | June 13th, 2007 at 9:48 am

As a long time SBC/AT&T DSL customer (2000-present), I was dumbfounded today to log into my mail to be greeted by giant banner ads. This is pathetic. Free e-mail users? Sure. But people who are paying top dollar for internet access? That’s wrong.

Dean Wilcox | June 13th, 2007 at 11:26 am

Yes, add my rant to the growing list. I actually pay $35/mo for “high speed” DSL. This is complete bull****!

D | June 13th, 2007 at 11:55 am

If i pay for no graphical ads like you state in your advertisement…

http://mailplus.mail.yahoo.com

then I should see no graphical ads. It’s like Yahoo is asking for a class action law suit on false advertising and revoking on services promised.

GET RID OF THE ADS for PAYING CUSTOMERS!

Rob Becker | June 13th, 2007 at 4:05 pm

One more thing…the ad for Dermitage? Could it be a little more distracting? Imagine how this looks when you’re accsesing mail in the office.

Gary L | June 13th, 2007 at 4:06 pm

Open Task Manager, size it and slide it over the cover the large banner on the right. It covers up the disgusting animation and the TM window will always stay on top.

Gary L | June 13th, 2007 at 4:06 pm

Has anyone in Marketing even considered that the side panel banner ad is so disgusting and irritating that I would not even consider opening it or buying the product.

(Yes, I have my MBA)

John Kremer | June 13th, 2007 at 4:23 pm

AT&T and Yahoo! have integrated advertisements into the AT&T Yahoo! Mail experience as a new source of revenue to help maintain AT&T and Yahoo!’s joint commitment of delivering a leading broadband experience — complete with industry leading features at a competitive price.

Thank you for expressing your concerns. We truly value your business and your feedback.

- John Kremer, Yahoo! Mail

Catheniale | June 13th, 2007 at 5:27 pm

I’m a long time SBC/ AT&T dsl subscriber-

I’d like to express that I HATE the ads recently placed beside and on top of my inbox. If I don’t want Spam, why would I want this junk?

Please remove the ads! I don’t need or want this distraction when I’m trying to view my email and I will go elsewhere for my service if it doesn’t stop!!!

David Powers | June 13th, 2007 at 5:29 pm

John,

My e-mail interface just flipped over today to your new ad banner format. I’m amazed that people as smart as you all are think that this is OK. It is unbelievably tasteless and obnoxious. The thing takes up 15% of my screen and cannot be adjusted, moved, turned off, etc. It flashes and gyrates and rotates while I’m trying to read my e-mail.

You need to come up with another solution to generate additional revenue. If you don’t, you know your customers will. Comcast calls me every other week wanting me to switch over to them.

Rob Becker | June 13th, 2007 at 5:56 pm

John Kremer, you’re missing the point. People log in to Yahoo Mail to check their e-mail…not get hit up to buy a new car, pursue an online degree, find people, or to take the “No Acne Challenge.” It’s understandable to put these on no-pay pages…but when you have customers paying for internet access and e-mail and you basically force them into using a webmail client littered with advertising, it’s wrong. I would gladly take a mailbox limit any day of the week over looking at the stupid ads I had to stare at all day today.

Try responding directly to one of your unhappy customers instead of the safe cookie cutter response.

BDD | June 13th, 2007 at 6:13 pm

John,

Stop with all the MBA / Marketing hype terms ( world class, industry leading, truly value your business). The rest of the world stopped using that type of language years ago.

Everyone realizes this is just BS. We all understand that this is a revenue generating program. However judging from the feedback and even from the folks at the customer support desk; it has raised more customer hostility than revenue.

You have taken your customer goodwill and over night turned your customer base into FURIOUS indifferent consumers looking for their next internet provider.

When will Yahoo/AT&T admit this campaign was a huge mistake and let the successor, to the bonehead with the idea, fix this mistake and try to win back what was a happy loyal customer base.

schuck | June 13th, 2007 at 6:17 pm

Mr. Kremer,

With all due respect, Yahoo should now be able to derive from the above posts the following:

1. The ads have utterly ruined an otherwise decent email interface – especially for those who use it for work. [Bet you use Outlook];

2. ATT claims it is Yahoo’s problem;

3. Subscribers receive zero preferential treatment over free users;

4. Your own users are finding work arounds – firefox, ditching the beta for the old client, pushing to Outlook, gmail;

5. Consumer perception is negative;

6. Yahoo risks continued erosion of its subscriber, user, and search engine market share absent a quick, and material response to these concerns.

Gary L | June 13th, 2007 at 7:39 pm

Then how about giving us just small buttons so we can open ads that might appear interesting. The big banner ad on the right is absolutely disgusting.

Benoit | June 13th, 2007 at 8:02 pm

John Kremer,

Thank you for answering yahoo dsl customer questions/comments regarding the new add in the yahoo mail plus service.

I am also one of these users and I am very disappointed with these news adds. I believe as a yahoo dsl customer, we are entitled to have a email service provided with the dsl service that is add free, especially graphic add free.

Also, I believe these graphical adds are ugly and their integration on the all right side of the window is really poorly designed. I am certain that a graphic artist student in a summer internship would have done a much better job.

If yahoo believes this the way, the company will generate more revenue, I am sorry but this is not the right answer. I am even convince, it will push a lot of the user to migrate to gmail. Yahoo should instead consentrate on developing new services and improving the great ones you already have. This is how you will win market share against google and msn.

Best regards,
Benoit

schuck | June 13th, 2007 at 8:09 pm

Yahoo Mail + ATT = GOOGLE

schuck | June 13th, 2007 at 9:43 pm

Mr. Kremer,
Have your finance department crunch numbers comparing the revenue from subscribers to, say, a 20% loss of portal and search engine business over the next 2 years. Is it really worth the quick buck? I think not. Yahoo is already on a downhill slide, and this move is only making it worse. Yahoo may as well give up the ghost. Sell out now to Google, or Microsoft, or go LBO before your stock price goes into the toilet. Unbelievable failure to respond to us as customers. Just deserts. It will happen.

scottr | June 13th, 2007 at 11:23 pm

THANKYOU!!! TO ALL OF YOU ATT/YAHOO CUSTOMERS WHO SENT IN THE ABOVE COMPLAINTS TO YAHOO. THAT WAS BETTER CUSTOMER SERVICE THAN THE HOURS I SPENT COMPLAINING AND TRYING TO GET THE HIDEOUS ADVERTISEMENTS OFF OF MY INBOX, CONTACTING AT&T BY CHAT, TECH SUPPORT BY PHONE, AND E-MAILS TO AT&T CUSTOMER SERVICE. AT&T TOLD ME TO CALL YAHOO, THEN YAHOO TOLD ME TO CALL AT&T WHO FINALLY TOLD ME THERE WAS _NOTHING_ ANYONE COULD DO AND THAT THE UGLY! ADDS (ESPECIALLY THE MANY VERSIONS OF THE WRINKLED EYE) WERE NEEDED TO PROVIDE “WORLD CLASS SERVICE”. THE ADDS HAVE BEEN THERE TWO WEEKS, I GET HEADACHES FROM THEM, AND I DON’T LIKE THEM ANY MORE TODAY THEN I DID TWO WEEKS AGO WHEN THEY CAME, UNSOLICITED AND UNWANTED. I SAID A LOT OF THE SAME THINGS YOU ALL SAID, INCLUDING THE IRONY OF WHY YAHOO MAIL PROVIDES SPAM BLOCKERS, THEN PUTS THE BIGGEST, FLASHIEST SPAM IN YOUR FACE WHILE YOU TRY TO ORGANIZE AND READ YOUR E-MAIL. SO THANK YOU ALL AGAIN VERY MUCH!!!! I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY ONE WHO HATES THESE ADVERTISEMENTS AND NOW I SEE THAT I AM FAR FROM ALONE. I ALSO HAVE THOUGHT OF LEAVING TO GO TO GMAIL OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT. BUT HEY! WHY NOT STAY WITH YAHOO FOR NOW, GET MORE UPSET WHEN THEY KEEP TELLING YOU THEY HAVE TO DO IT TO PROVIDE THE FREE SERVICE THAT YOU PAY FOR, THEN CLOG UP THEIR TECH SUPPORT LINES WITH COMPLAINTS AND DEFEAT THE WHOLE PURPOSE OF THE TECH SUPPORT SERVICE. THEN ON 7-7-07 IF YOU ARE STILL UPSET, YOU COULD LEAVE THE COMPANY FOR GOOD. WHAT THE HECK, OTHER PROTESTS ARE PLANNED ON THAT DAY. BY THE WAY, THIS IS ALL IN CAPS BECAUSE THAT IS HOW I SENT FEEDBACK TO AT&T, HOPING THEY MIGHT GET MY MESSAGE. By the way, that response by that John guy on Jun 13 at 4:23 seemed a little weak didn’t it. Who was that? Oh, he works for Yahoo!

scottr

AoiGSR | June 13th, 2007 at 11:49 pm

No more happy e-mailing for me with Yahoo unless the ads go. A lot of users who pay for the no graphical ads are now gettings ads. What your say you provide for Mail Plus services is now contridictory (Is that False advertising now? :|) While this probably is considered changing the terms of service, which I assume you probably say you can do what you want, You’re going to lose a lot of customers. At least with Yahoo Japan, the ads look pretty. US ads are garbage, with exception of Geico. The ads with the dermatage. How much they paying Yahoo? I guess more than all of us Mail Plus customers.

If you expect to make more money for your public company, you’ve got to be more creative. You guys are taking the easy way out. Of all companys :|

If this does not get resolved, soon, consider me dropping my account as well. Imagine the ramifications of those that will leave. Or perhaps the advertisers are paying more so your revenues will look better and if you do lose all your mail plus customers, you don’t care. Because all you’ll be caring about are your quarterly earnings. I’ve enjoyed the services Yahoo has provided in the past. But this is the first time, where I’ll be considering other web based e-mail instead.

rosie | June 13th, 2007 at 11:57 pm

The advertisement is the worst in the world. For me that is terrible. Now in the U.S., I think I am in Venezuela with Chavez. What they said you do, you do. I pay for internet. If I don’t pay for internet I don’t see advertisement.

Rosie,

Uma Brasileira Desesperada

Desesperada com essa nassa da propaganda que vai me levar direito pro infeirno da locoura

nathan | June 14th, 2007 at 12:02 am

I have a friend here at work who does not recieve internet at her home, but she is a customer of AT&T. I have told her about my unhappiness with the 2 inch by 8 inch add on the right side of the inbox that squezes my e-mail into a little 6 inch square box, and she said she will mention it to her colleages and complain to AT&T when she calls them about her phone service.

Dan Glovier | June 14th, 2007 at 7:58 am

Please remove the advertising from my email reader – I pay for a service, and I expect my experience not to be affected by your advertising.

I can see ads being included in the additional features you offer – that’s fine. But email reading is one of the core components to any online provider, and I expect to be able to do this efficiently, without losing real estate, and without being harassed by ads.

Jim Del Favero | June 14th, 2007 at 9:52 am

Nice canned response Kremer, fortunately it is easy to write with a straight face. I would think if you had to look someone in the eye and give them that response you would be hard pressed to not start laughing.

You have addressed none of our concerns, congratulations, you just made it worse than not responding at all.

Instead of continuing to drive revenue off of the backs of your minority of paying customers, why not try to convert more of the non-paying folk to paying customers. I am pretty sure that is the larger opportunity. I could create a pie chart outlining that if it would help.

If all else fails I am sure you could put a mandatory click through ad and force everyone to go through that before they get to their email. Or maybe one of those 5 minute video ads.

I am sure that would drive revenue.

I will be at the In and Out Burger in Mountain View at lunch if you want to swing by and talk about other ways to degrade your paying customers experience in order to increase revenue by a barely perceptible amount.

Greg | June 14th, 2007 at 10:17 am

The ads are abusive, repugnant, and intrusive. I refuse to continue paying for a service that makes my experience much more difficult with the use of advertisements.

Give me the service free, and I’ve got nothing to complain about. But, you’re not.

Scooby DOO | June 14th, 2007 at 10:22 am

John Kramer, whoever you are,

Are you listening to all the above bloggers?

Are you ever going to respond more than once every 20 days?

Are you going to respond to the actual complaints being sent to you?

Do you realize that ATT says to call Yahoo and Yahoo says to call ATT?

Does Yahoo have some kind of agenda in mind to allianate it’s users?

Is John Kramer your real name, and what is your position at Yahoo?

Do you actually take to heart any of the suggestions in this blog?

Why do you say “NO ads” when in fact you include VERY offensive ads?

Who are you selling the business too,… Google? Bill Gates?

Well….. is anybody there? Does anybody care? Does anybody see what I see?

P.S.: Kramer, loved you on Seinfeld

Scooby DOO | June 14th, 2007 at 10:24 am

By the way:

Who are you fooling with the:

“YOUR COMMENT IS AWAITING MODERATION” routine?

S. Chuck | June 14th, 2007 at 10:24 am

Subscribers – start letting the media know your feelings if Yahoo won’t provide anything other than this canned response.

Kim | June 14th, 2007 at 12:33 pm

I am an AT&T (formerly SBC) DSL subscriber and pay for my DSL service and receive Yahoo Mail Plus with my service and now am subjected to these unwanted ads in my mail window. This is utterly frustrating and ridiculous that a paying customer is subjected to this, without notification, and without receiving an answer other than it is to provide world class service, won’t be going away anytime soon, and thank you for being a customer. I hope that AT&T Yahoo is taking these complaints seriously.

Joy | June 14th, 2007 at 4:04 pm

Mr. Kremer,

Thank you for your response to AT&T Yahoo customers. If advertising is going to allowed through these accounts, I STRONGLY urge Yahoo to stop saying DSL customers have Yahoo! Plus accounts. That is no longer the case. And since I have these ads, I will be canceling my DSL service when it runs out next month, and switching my e-mail to gmail.

A former fan of Yahoo

David Powers | June 14th, 2007 at 5:10 pm

John,

This is my second submission on this subject. I’m looking for something other than a canned marketing response from you (Yahoo!) on this subject. I am actively looking at switching to another provider now and will be making a decision shortly if I don’t see a meaningful response/resolution to my and everyone else’s protests over the intrusive add banner.

I did note today that the banner got slightly smaller and that the adds seemed to tone down a little. So you all must be seeing our response to this insult and considering the ramifications. Are you going to remove it or at least give us users controls over it so that we can turn it off if we don’t want to see it?

BTW, you can pass this pledge onto your advertisers: I vow never to buy anything from anyone I see on that banner so long as the banner exists.

Future Ex-customer of AT&T | June 14th, 2007 at 8:24 pm

I submitted a harassment complaint and was told that ads are not harassment, but required to provide world class service.

It sounds like everyone is getting the same message, which is consistent with AT&T’s service model.

Here are some of my personal experiences with AT&T over the last TWO months:
1. Phone service out – 5 days to send a technician (although they are installers everyday in the neighborhood for the complaint-ridden uverse)

2. DSL modem failed – 2 weeks to receive a replacement. I had to call 3 times, and argue to receive a rebate and free shipping. I ended up getting two modems.

3. Flashing, annoying ads that take up 1/4 of my screen.

I understand that things break, but they should be fixed in a timely manner. The ads just pushed me over the edge.

Every time that I call, they give a hard sell for their “quad-slam” services, etc. I have to interrupt almost every other sentence to say that I am calling for help, not to buy additional services.

What’s even more amazing….I’m in San Antonio…you would think that they could at least service their customers across town from their headquarters.

Time warner and gmail, here I come….internet, tv, phone and all.

schuck | June 14th, 2007 at 9:08 pm

Mr. Kremer,

The ads are like a jack in the box – they spring out at your face with headspinning alarcity – neon bulbs flashing on and off. Empty your spam and deleted folders and see it happen. The problem Yahoo now faces is that subscribers and users alike have identified the main problem with the rollout – THE ADS UTTERLY RUIN THE BETA INTERFACE.

So you have a double edged sword: (1) loyal subscribers are leaving; and (2) the ADVERTISING interface will act as a repellent to any free users.

The effect and net result is so easy to quantify, and right in front of Yahoo’s nose. ACCELERATED LOSS OF PORTAL AND SEARCH USERS. Indeed, users don’t even have to abandon Yahoo as their portal or ATT/Yahoo DSL provider, they will just start using gmail, and using Google or Live Search. MARKET SHARE LOSS RESULTS IMMEDIATELY BECAUSE THE WEBMAIL INTERFACE IS SO HORRIBLE. It is the antithesis of the “leading broadband experience” you proclaim.

I urge Yahoo, as a long time, loyal customer, to heed customers’ concerns immediately, while there’s still a chance to avoid total, brand ruination from the rollout. If Yahoo fails to act decisively and swiftly, this is the beginning of the end. Bummer for users, but we have options. Yahoo doesn’t.

andyo | June 15th, 2007 at 12:02 am

And meanwhile, Hotmail has moved away from ads in their Windows Live Desktop interface. It’s funny, I was about to “rollout” towards the ex-super clean Yahoo interface from the buggy and Firefox-unfriendly Hotmail for my personal email. Really, just a few days before I got the ads I was gonna do that. The I downloaded Windows Live desktop and was pleasantly surprised. Hopefully they will retain the clean interface, as they used to have an ad there that they took out now.

Damien | June 15th, 2007 at 1:52 am

Just like everyone else, I’m pissed that I’m paying a monthly fee for my AT&T Yahoo DSL service, yet, I have to put up with ads. What’s the deal with this? I’ve been a paying subcriber for 2 year, but if this doesn’t change soon, I’ll be switching to a different DSL provider, or even cable.

Save the ads for the free users, not the PAYING users like myself and so many others.

Oh, almost forgot, it gets better. Right now if I want to get ride of the ads, all I have to do is upgrade to Business mail for only $9.99 a month more then I’m already paying. What???

Bad move AT&T Yahoo… If I have to look at ads while checking my e-mail, maybe you should **** ** *** once a month so I could feel better about paying my bill. How’s that for world class service?

Gary L | June 15th, 2007 at 8:05 am

Start doing what I have done; go in through the back door. I continue to e-mail Dermitage and others that buy the large, right side banner space to complain about their intrusive, abusive, irritating and demeaning advertising with ATT Yahoo on the e-mail page. Let’s see if that has any effect.

Josh | June 15th, 2007 at 10:19 am

Mr. Kremer,

I am a long time Yahoo email user (since 1996), and a long time SBC / Cingular / AT&T customer. I have AT&T for my DSL, home phone (both local and long distance), wireless (via the old Cingular) and I even use yahoo for my website hosting. Heck, I even was willing to become an AT&T u-verse customer. I think that I’m the type of customer that you would appreciate and want to keep.

I am extremely offended by AT&T and Yahoo’s decision to start placing very large and obtrusive ads in the right hand side of my email account, which I pay for as an AT&T DSL customer. I don’t mind ads in general, but to take up almost 1/3 of the usable space on the webpage is an extremely poor design idea. Had you done any user acceptance testing with yahoo customers prior to rolling this out?

The ads ruin my yahoo mail experience, so much so that I am currently looking at alternatives for all of my AT&T and Yahoo services that I am currently using.

I know that I am most likely in the big scheme of things I am a small customer, but I hope that by taking my business else ware, it will send a message to both AT&T and Yahoo.

Dd | June 15th, 2007 at 1:33 pm

Here is a thread from another website where we started the same conversation:
—————————-
May 4, 2007 at 6:28 am · Hot Web Topics
Tags: ads, breaking news, E mail, free, hosting, paid, unlimited,

—————————————————-

Merlin said,

May 5, 2007 @ 5:36 pm

Hmm, that’s odd Mitch. I just checked the status of my Yahoo “Mail Plus” account and it still states no ads or tag lines. Maybe it’s to do with AT&T’s version?

—————————————————-
Mitch said,

May 5, 2007 @ 6:38 pm

Well with them saying that it “is coming” I don’t think they have rolled ‘em out yet. I hope they will change their minds. I don’t mind ads on some sites – but for application sites like Web mail, RSS reader, ect – I’d rather be ad free.

—————————————————-
Joe Beaulaurier said,

May 5, 2007 @ 6:55 pm

Thanks for sharing this.

Users from Yahoo!’s ISP partners (AT&T, SBC, Verizon, etc) may all receive such letters or maybe just AT&T users. And maybe Y! Mail Plus users will lose the advertising-free interface as one of their bonuses, maybe not.

This one letter doesn’t enable determining any of the above. So casting dispersions Y!’s way may be missing the mark. Your ISP may be choosing to package Y! Mail this way in order to gain a revenue share opportunity.

I certainly hope Verizon doesn’t follow suit. That’s where my hat’s hung. But if it happens, I’d be happy to sign up directly for Y! Mail Plus if that program offered an ad-free mail interface. Otherwise, I may be driven to use Thunderbird.

Time will tell.

—————————————————-
John Doe said,

May 6, 2007 @ 1:04 pm

I am testing out yahoos new email, hopefully the unlimited gets into effect really really soon, drop me a line @ unlimited_email_test@yahoo.com or unlimitedemailtest@gmail.com Thanks

Dd said,

June 6, 2007 @ 1:01 am

The ads hit my inbox tonight. Unacceptably obtrusive and annoying. I cannot believe paying DSL customers are being treated this way. No way I’m gonna send AT&T/Yahoo more money for an ad-free “plus” account. That is part of what I’ve been paying for the past several years. Time to change my homepage to Google and set-up a G-mail account.

—————————————————-
Austin said,

June 6, 2007 @ 10:22 am

I’m a paid AT&T/Yahoo Mail, and first the very fist time I’ve found it being “decorated” and “laced” with all sorts of ads. I suppose I’d just have live with them now.

—————————————————-
Matt said,

June 7, 2007 @ 4:46 pm

I am on the phone with Yahoo At&T right now and they maintain that this is a part of their world class service. They are actually telling me that over the phone! It does get better, they are trying to give me a case ID that….you guessed it….they cannot send via email! I am a mail plus customer as well, no way I am sticking around and paying for something like this. Off to Google and GMail.
Yahoo! Mail Gets “Ads”

—————————————————-
Upgrade said,

June 8, 2007 @ 6:53 am

[…] Well I guess it finally happened sometime last night. The nice sleek and clean interface of Yahoo! Mail became ad-tastic. As an AT&T DSL customer I was getting the “plus” E-mail pack with my Web mail from Yahoo. I have been over this story before though. […]

—————————————————-
Ann said,

June 8, 2007 @ 11:42 am

Ha ha! I got the same “world class service” line from them this morning, too but through live chat:

AT&T: Hi Customer! How may I help you?

ME: I just want to register a complaint that I hate the ads in my email. I feel that since this is not a free email account and I have been paying your company for 8 yrs. as my ISP, I should have ADS-Free email.

AT&T: I appreciate your patience and apologize for the inconvenience this has caused

ME (after long pause): This is lame

AT&T: We apologize for the inconvenience. The advertising is a needed step towards providing world class service at an affordable price.

AT&T: Please bear with us, it is just a temporary advertisement. Im sorry!

ME: Honestly, I have never had world class service from this company and I am not sure that it is even possible.

Your session has ended. You may now close this window.

—————————————————-
Kada Situ said,

June 8, 2007 @ 10:41 pm

This is completely lame, I would prefer having only 2gig of space with no ads. I don’t care about the unlimited storage, since I will backup all the email into Outlook anyways. I really, really hate these new ads as I never seen them before >:(

—————————————————-
Tony said,

June 10, 2007 @ 7:07 am

I was on the phone for two hours and got the same load of “canned responses” from everyone I talked to.

Has any hacker figured out how to disable the ads yet?

—————————————————-
schuck said,

June 11, 2007 @ 12:17 pm

I’ve posted my ire over on
http://yodel.yahoo.com/2007/05/14/unlimited-storage-its-coming/#comment-51010

Get the word out, and maybe this unbelievable marketing gaff will gain some momentum in the news.

—————————————————-
andyo said,

June 12, 2007 @ 2:45 pm

Hi all, I came to this site through googling for people who had the same trouble as I did. You can get rid of the ads in Firefox (at least visually, but not entirely blocked), but if you haven’t done so yet, I’d encourage you to complain. That vertical banner is horribly obtrusive. On a 1024 or 1280 horizontal screen is just unbearable. Check out my screenshots.

This is with the new ads.

This is after using Adblock plus to block and hide elements.

These are my Adblock settings. Copy the lines exactly into the Adblock plus filters and they should get rid of the ads.

As you can see, though, I still have the big annoying vertical blank space to the right. Hiding the elements for that messes up the whole page, so I can’t do it. It may have to do with the messenger “feature” that these people added. I don’t care for Yahoo messenger and I don’t want it in my mail. It’s funny, just a couple of weeks ago I was thinking of switching from Hotmail to Yahoo, because of their very clean interface, no tagline ads at the end of emails for us paid customers.

The tide turned quickly. The new Windows Live Desktop gets rid of ALL ads (including taglines) and provides many more features, and it’s faster. It’s still in the final beta stages, though, so they may add some ads by the final release, but the way it’s been evolving, (from annoying ads to none at all) I’m hopeful.

—————————————————-
andyo said,

June 12, 2007 @ 2:50 pm

oops, sorry. These are my settings for Adblock.

You can also use the Element Hiding Helper to aid you, but this will only hide unblockable elements, like Google’s text ads and such.

—————————————————-
Kumar said,

June 12, 2007 @ 5:33 pm

I can’t believe they think people are stupid enough to buy this “world class” service nonsense. We need to organize something to help them know this is quite inapropriate. I’m paying for dumb advertisements???

Bryan Mills | June 15th, 2007 at 2:34 pm

These ads are pretty awful. I’m considering using a “forward” for my Yahoo! mail to Gmail or my office Outlook mail.

Alex, long time Yahoo DSL User | June 15th, 2007 at 5:09 pm

Please add my vote to “very unhappy paying customer” list. The new adds are terrible and runing the email experience. Particularily those of us who access email from work and the big flashy ads is the last thing we need popping up on a desktop in a busy business envinroment.

But then again, it’s all been said before. I have no doubt that whatever additinal revenue stream from those ads will be more than offset by the lost paying customer base, not to mention lost respect in the eyes of many users. Does Yhaoo want to be new “AOL”? It certainly seems that way.

I am going to hope for the best and give yahoo & ATT suits till the end of the month to back this out before i move on with my DSL business elsewhere.

In the meantime, i suggest users to check out this brand new portal and email website with absolutely no pop up ads:

http://www.myway.com/

It’s not as flashy as yahoo, but sometimes thats a good thing. Particularily when it comes to email.

I hope yahoo management folks do the right thing sooner ratehr than later before me and many outhers move out of here permanently….

Cheers
-Alex

John | June 15th, 2007 at 9:53 pm

Hi to all,

The ads are driving me crazy… I am seriously considering switching my ISP ASP. Ditch the ads SBC…

Vito | June 15th, 2007 at 9:57 pm

First ads start appearing on my AT&T home page….

….Ads then start appearing on my beta and original versions of AT&T e-mail…

…My promotional DSL price package has expired with no renewal offers – so now I am paying even more money towards AT&T DSL….

Ads+more ads+more spend for DSL…

But wait – no more contract so freedom to move services….

Priceless!

nathan | June 15th, 2007 at 10:03 pm

I think I know who is behind this whole thing! It isn’t Yahoo or AT&T, it’s Dermatage. They have the most annoying distracting advertisements, that stay up longer than any others, and many versions: *Las Vegas style flashing colored lights, *an extremely distracting silohette of a man waving his hands, *a bubble bath over that old, hideous, wrinkled eye, *a bright green dial that passes over the old eye and makes you think you have been abducted by aliens, and a before and after photo of an old mouth that trade places really fast – all by Dermatage. This company must be rich and powerful and maybe they will buy some search engine and e-mail company. I HATE THAT COMPANY!!! And I never heard of them a week ago. At least Yahoo is letting us have this forum. They could do nasty things with our posts (censor or discard them) but they don’t. And I really thought it was a kind of cool company before they sent me Dermatage. And thank you Yahoo for giving us this chance to tell you what we think about the advertisements. We are not in Venezuela like Rosie said, you just make us feel that way because you won’t give us the freedom to turn these ads off. So I was interested in the e-mail of the person above who said that radio talk shows are taling about the Yahoo advertisements. I would like the link of a radio or t.v. station or something on a site like Google, Wikipedia, or a magazine or newspaper site, to get an idea about what the rest of the public thinks about this whole thing. Besides, John is probably ready to send out a new newsletter, and I would like to see what the readers have to say next month.

nathan

Floyd | June 16th, 2007 at 12:59 am

This is by far the best place I have seen this issue addressed. I thank Mr Kramer for having the courage to post here and address this firestorm, and finaly admit Yahoo’s culpability in this decision. I had to search out this page to find this, it is very well hidden. At least now I know whose brainchild this fiasco was.

I *have* switched not only ISPs, but PHONE SERVICE ALSO specifically *because of* the ads in my AT&T e-mail interface. I encourage all you angry folks out there to shop around and show them your outrage with your wallet. Now, I am rid of the poor quality customer service I have consistantly recieved from Yahoo, and occasionally from AT&T as well (who took two months to fix an over-billing issue, and it still isn’t right).

I’ve had AT&T for ten years, and Yahoo DSL for the past couple years. I’d be with you still if not for this final straw. Now that I’m free, I don’t know why I waited so long. You may be on a sinking ship, Mr Kramer. I hope you get a good life jacket out of it, you are the only Yahoo rep to step up and even say it was a Yahoo decision in anyway.

If you use Yahoo mail beta, switch back to the pre-beta look, at least you can scroll past the ad then. Archive your e-mails via the MS Outlook Express, and find a new home. Yahoo can say they value our feedback, but until they stop this trainwreck of “upgrades” in their services, it’s only getting worse from here.

“Floyd”, former AT&T/Yahoo customer

julian | June 16th, 2007 at 2:40 pm

Yahoo mail plus is still advertised as banner free. Pretty sad whats happening at yahoo. My inbox became flooded with these ugly ads few days ago and sure enough I’m not alone. Thumbs down yahoo. Another lost dsl customer.

andyo | June 17th, 2007 at 7:35 am

Floyd, if I may ask, what region do you live in, and what alternative did you get?

I have been trying to search for alternatives in the L.A. area, but now I think the only one is Time Warner! A O L ! That’s gotta be even worse than this, so I am stuck. I think Earthlink DSL leases the phone lines from AT&T, so the service is equivalent, but more expensive.

Thanks.

JG | June 17th, 2007 at 9:41 am

Guys,

BIG screwup with the new ads in Yahoo Mail. I’ve been a paying Yahoo/AT&T DSL customer for years now (I was a Mail Plus customer before that), and they are unacceptably intrusive for a paying customer.

I don’t need the unlimited storage, but I really appreciated the clean, uncluttered interface of the “new” yahoo mail. That’s gone now, and I’m looking for other providers, including Gmail.

Your customer research probably told you this was a very bad idea. Why would you screw up such a great interface with such intrusive ads?

Just really dumb.

JG
Los Angeles, CA

nathan | June 17th, 2007 at 1:42 pm

Really unprofessional.

michele foran | June 17th, 2007 at 2:42 pm

I will gladly give up 90% of my Yahoo storage for their removing the annoying ads. I will be switching if the ads continue and pay google what ever they want (for ad removal) since the company gives us so much for free anyhow.

Eric | June 17th, 2007 at 5:17 pm

I too am sorely disappointed with yahoo. These flashing ads and banners on all corners of the screen is enough to give me an epileptic seizure. Hmmm, I wonder when someone’s going to claim that as a lawsuit …lol!!! Anyway, I can’t even focus to write an email. I can’t believe that I am paying for this junk. I used to be a loyal yahoo user, but I guess it’s time to make that gmail switch. I really hope your stock suffers from this new age spam. Shame, shame, shame on you.

schuck | June 18th, 2007 at 9:47 am

Yahoo, ATT, objections to the ads are gaining momentum, see:

http://text.dslreports.com/forum/remark,18459010

schuck | June 18th, 2007 at 10:39 am

Hey, the ADS are also getting HUGE on the new beta home page for ATT/Yahoo. HUGE!

Gary L | June 18th, 2007 at 2:35 pm

Semel out as Yahoo! CEO
Struggling No. 2 search engine taps co-founder Jerry Yang as CEO; Semel staying on as chairman; stock surges.
By Paul R. La Monica, CNNMoney.com editor at large
June 18 2007: 5:10 PM EDT

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Yahoo!, the No. 2 search firm that has struggled in its battle with Google, said Monday that Terry Semel was out as chief executive officer, to be succeeded by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.

Susan Decker, who heads a relatively new group that deals with the company’s advertisers and publishers, and until recently was also CFO, was promoted to president.
terry_semel_yahoo.03.jpg
Terry Semel is no longer the CEO of Yahoo!
jerry_yang_yahoo.03.jpg
Co-founder Jerry Yang is replacing Semel.
decker_susan_yahoo.03.jpg
Sue Decker, who had been in charge of a new group overseeing advertisers, was promoted to president.

Semel, who joined Yahoo (Charts, Fortune 500) as chairman and CEO in May 2001, will stay on as non-executive chairman. But Semel has come under pressure from investors in the past year as the company has fallen further behind top rival Google (Charts, Fortune 500) in the online advertising market.

Shares of Yahoo surged 3 percent in heavy trading on Nasdaq Monday as speculation mounted that Semel might step down – and the stock rallied another 3 percent in after-hours trading.

Last week, Semel faced questions from several disappointed shareholders about the company’s strategy. Earlier this year, Yahoo unveiled an eagerly awaited new search platform for advertisers, called Project Panama.
Semel wards off criticism, eyes growth

But so far, Panama has failed to boost results for the company. Yahoo reported disappointing results for the first quarter in April and issued weaker-than-expected guidance for the remainder of 2007.

Semel has also been criticized by Wall Street for not being as aggressive as Google, MySpace parent News Corp (Charts, Fortune 500). and others in making acquisitions of hot online companies. News Corp. bought the popular social networking site MySpace in 2005 and Google acquired online video leader YouTube last year.

Yahoo’s stock has underperformed Google’s stock by a wide margin during the past year and since Google went public almost three years ago. That has led to some recent speculation that Yahoo could be a takeover target for Microsoft, (Charts, Fortune 500) whose MSN search engine ranks third behind Google and Yahoo.

In a statement, Semel said he wanted to ensure a “smooth succession” and that the time was right for him to step back. During a conference call Monday afternoon, he reiterated this and also said that the past year has been a “difficult” one for Yahoo.

“I believe Jerry and Sue, with their superb talents and intense dedication to Yahoo! and its people, are the perfect combination to carry us forward,” he said. “This is the time for new executive leadership, with different skills and strengths, to step in and drive the company to realize its full potential – it is the right thing to do, and the right time is now,” he said.

During the call, an emotional Yang expressed his gratitude to Semel for his more than six years at the company and said he looked forward to working more closely with Decker, a former Wall Street analyst who is widely respected by investors. Top of page
MSN-Yahoo?

Amanda L | June 18th, 2007 at 4:18 pm

Just another paying AT&T Yahoo DSL customer stopping by to let you know just how appalled I am at the incredibly intrusive ads that monopolize the Yahoo mail interface. I’ve stuck with Yahoo mail strictly based on the clean, easy to use interface. Thanks for giving me that final kick in the pants I needed to switch to Gmail. I will be terminating my DSL service shortly.

Michael J | June 18th, 2007 at 11:31 pm

Yep, another one. Longtime AT&T and SBC customer who’s utterly disgusted by the ads. Dancing people? Flashing lights? 1/3 of my screen space? And I’m paying for this? This is a terrible, terrible decision all the way around. As someone upthread said, do you really think ANY of us will EVER click on one of these ads? EVER??

Terminating service shortly as well.

Floyd | June 19th, 2007 at 12:01 am

Andyo asked:
“Floyd, if I may ask, what region do you live in, and what alternative did you get?”

I’m in northern CA, and went with a bundle deal from a cable company that has gotten in to the market for cable internet and phone. It’s more expensive than before, but my speed went up, my cable expanded, and I can check my voicemail online now. I put that in the win column for now. It was worth the price to be rid of both seriously unsatisfactory companies. I have moved everything to a gmail address also, and I think those of you considering switching to gmail would enjoy it, once you get used to the less traditional way it displays messages. I know I’m loving it, and the ads are no big thing either. I should say I’m not trying to shill any particular service to anyone, but I do encourgae you to show both these companies what a huge mistake they have both made with double-dipping on the already paying customers. If cost of service was an issue, raise the rates, but *don’t* hit us with ads. I sent in several e-mails on the subject of the ad placement when using the free YM beta on how obnoxiously placed and intolerable the ads were. Obviously to no effect. I won’t stay with a company that can’t listen to its users.

YOHOA | June 19th, 2007 at 9:47 am

Yahoo’s stock is going downhill fast.

John Kramer is now too CHICKEN to respond in this blog!

WHY IS THAT?

Because he DOESN’T Exist.

Does anyone else notice that when “he” DOES respond, it’s with some scripted text.

Yahoo has the WORST customer service of ANY company in history!

You better get your act together or it’s BYE BYE!!!!

Your “Bush administration” type arrogence is not acceptable!!!!

Alaska | June 19th, 2007 at 9:52 am

READ THIS:
No wonder their floundering!!!!!

Yahoo Co-Founder Replaces Semel As CEO

SAN FRANCISCO — After exasperating investors for most of the past 18 months, Yahoo Inc. Chairman Terry Semel finally found a way to please Wall Street by stepping aside as chief executive.

Semel’s capitulation, announced late Monday, came less than a week after he faced off with shareholders disillusioned with the company’s lackluster performance as Internet search leader Google Inc. pulled further ahead in the lucrative online advertising market.

The malaise had contributed to a nearly 30 percent drop in Yahoo’s stock price since the end of 2005.

To fill the void created by Semel’s departure, Yahoo appointed company co-founder Jerry Yang as its new CEO and named Susan Decker as its president. Decker, who had been touted as Semel’s heir apparent, was recently promoted from Yahoo’s chief financial officer to oversee the company’s advertising operations.

Semel, 64, will remain chairman in a non-executive role after spending the past six years running the company.

“The company is in good hands,” Semel said in an interview Monday. “I felt like it was time for me to move more into a coach’s role than a player’s role.”

Wall Street applauded the new pecking order. Yahoo shares gained 81 cents finish at $28.12 Monday, then surged $1.33, or 4.7 percent, in extended trading.

Signaling Semel’s decision was voluntary, Yahoo said he will not receive a severance package. The former movie studio executive already has made a fortune since joining Yahoo in May 2001, having realized nearly $450 million in gains by exercising some of the stock options he received during his tenure.

Despite Yahoo’s recent struggles, Semel received another big bundle of stock options last year that boosted the value of his 2006 compensation package to $71.7 million. That was more than any other CEO among 386 publicly held companies covered in an Associated Press analysis of executive compensation using new rules dictated by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The options granted Semel last year were part of a contract that was supposed to ensure he remained Yahoo’s CEO through 2008.

In a conference call Monday, an emotional Yang hailed Semel as “a role model and mentor” and then sought to defuse recent speculation that Yahoo might be sold to Microsoft Corp. or another suitor hoping to exploit the recent turmoil at the company.

In an interview later, Yang reiterated his belief that Yahoo will remain independent. “We are well aware of the challenges facing Yahoo,” he said. “We need to execute better and to get better talent. I feel Yahoo needed someone to be here for the long haul.”

Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence said the next few months may determine Yahoo’s fate.

“Yahoo still has a lot of great opportunities, but it’s also a very precarious time for them,” Sterling said. “They can’t afford to be tentative.”

Yang, 38, still owns a 4 percent stake in the company currently worth about $1.5 billion. Fellow co-founder David Filo, who is helping to run Yahoo’s technology group after the sudden retirement of the department’s leader earlier this month, owns a 6 percent stake worth about $2.3 billion.

This will mark the first time that Yang _ previously known as “chief Yahoo” _ has been in charge of the company in more than a decade.

Since Semel’s arrival in May 2001, Yahoo’s stock has nearly tripled as the company benefited from the influx of advertising flowing to the Internet from newspapers, magazines and other more-established media. But Yahoo’s inability to capitalize on the shift as adroitly as Google tarnished Semel’s legacy.

Mountain View-based Google now makes more money in a single quarter than Yahoo does in an entire year. The contrast represents a harsh comedown for Yahoo, which was the larger of the two companies when Google went public in August 2004.

Since then, Google has steadily expanded upon the Internet’s largest advertising network to create nearly $140 billion in shareholder wealth as its stock price increased by more than sixfold. Yahoo’s stock, meanwhile, is worth a little bit less than when Google went public.

Google’s meteoric rise is an especially hard pill for Semel to swallow because he once flirted with the idea of buying Google. In mid-2002, Semel reportedly terminated negotiations when Google set its sales price at $5 billion.

Google’s success since then has decimated the employee morale at Yahoo, leading to a recent wave of executive departures that raised concerns about whether the company would be able to retain the talent it needs to regain its stride.

“It’s a tough place to be when you see another company eating your lunch like that,” said Mike McGuire, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

Just last week, Semel assured shareholders attending Yahoo’s annual meeting that he had the fortitude to lead a comeback. He has been counting on recent improvements to Yahoo’s online advertising system and a series of key partnerships to boost profits after the company suffered an 11 percent drop in its first-quarter earnings while Google’s profit soared 69 percent.

In Monday’s conference call, Decker said the advertising upgrade, known as Panama, is delivering results that so far have exceeded management’s expectations.

mzam | June 19th, 2007 at 10:00 am

I’m not even upset anymore. I just wish yahoo will take extra money from me just to lose the banners! I even came up with a name for the plan! Yahoo Mail Extra Plus Pro. I’ll be the first customer. But yes! Shame on Yahoo…bad bad tactics.

Kumar | June 19th, 2007 at 10:30 am

Shame on AT&T and Yahoo on their recent policy of forcing advertisements into PAID accounts. I’m looking to switch out of your service as soon as I can find another more appropriate provider in my area. The party line of providing “world class service” is so stupid. Does the company think that people are so stupid and dumb as to accept that? I will NOT recommend your service ever and will discontinue my contract. It is quite unfortunate that all my years of getting DSL and e.mail service through y’all has to end like this… but it must (unless your policy changes)

andyo | June 19th, 2007 at 12:37 pm

Well, Floyd thanks for the info…

Unfortunately, here down in L.A. the only cable alternative is Time Warner, I believe, and I despise AOL more than I will ever AT&T and Yahoo combined. I’m not much of a telephone user so I only got the most basic telephone deal with AT&T, and my cel is a pre-paid T-Mobile, on which I spent probably about $60 in one year. So I don’t have too many gripes with AT&T by itself, though I understand they’re one of the sleaziest phone companies. Anyway, it’s my only choice for a landline, so I will have to suck it up. And anyway, I see this as an offense from Yahoo more than anything. Maybe I’ll try Earthlink.

Robert Gonzalez | June 19th, 2007 at 1:19 pm

AT&T and Yahoo! have integrated advertisements into the AT&T Yahoo! Mail experience as a new source of revenue to help maintain AT&T and Yahoo!’s joint commitment of delivering a leading broadband experience — complete with industry leading features at a competitive price.

Thank you for expressing your concerns. We truly value your business and your feedback.

- John Kremer, Yahoo! Mail

And this means what to those of us that are expecting ad-free Yahoo mail? We are paying for something that you are not delivering. You have yet to address that.

We (those of us that either pay for Yahoo Mail Plus or get it as part of our SBC/Yahoo DSL package) are literally being stolen from. Robbed, if you will. It is like me selling you a car that is supposed to have a nice stereo, then when you get it and find out it has an 8-track in it, telling you that we are trying to offer you a world class driving experience. What kind of garbage is that?

It appears to me that Yahoo has finally decided to give Google every possible share of the web services market that they can. I know that after at least 5 years of being a loyal Yahoo mail subscriber (and at times a Yahoo mail evangelist) I can safely say that I am about to kick my Yahoo mail to the curb in favor of Gmail. You lost search, you lost news, you lost developers and now you are losing mail users. Way to go Yahoo.

Maybe you can publish an eBook on how to completely piss off your customers while screwing your own business in the process.

paul | June 19th, 2007 at 4:11 pm

time to call it quits. I’m getting cable. yahoo is dead anyway.

V | June 19th, 2007 at 4:29 pm

I was a big fan of Yahoo!Mail until they started showing adds.
I am paying for Yahoo Mail Plus and do not want to have part of my screen displaying for unsolicited adds!
I have an account with gmail that I was not using so far but this change in Yahoo Mail made me change my mind and I will soon drop Yahoo completely.

David Powers | June 19th, 2007 at 5:50 pm

Well, goodbye Yahoo! Webmail. It was nice while it lasted. Yahoo!, you had a great product and you ruined it. As of 5 minutes ago, I have moved my e-mail to Gmail. Anyone reading this, I suggest you do the same. You can even keep your Yahoo! (or in my case SBC) e-mail account so when you send e-mail, it looks no different to the receiver than when you send it from Yahoo! Google makes it very easy to do. It took me all of about 10 minutes to complete the whole process.

Yahoo!, too bad you put more stock into what your marketing flunkies say than your paying customers.

And it is just a matter of time and personal bandwidth before I cancel my AT&T/Yahoo! account completely and move to Comcast. Just as soon as I have a free weekend to reconfigure my hardware at home. Comcast is offering me a free wireless router with a new account. Sounds great!

Hey, how’s that new revenue stream working out for you?

nathan | June 19th, 2007 at 8:28 pm

Yohoo Yahoo! Remember that Pink Floyd song: “Is there anybody out there?” I wonder if you really are hearing us. This site with the initial message “unlimited storage it’s coming” is one of the best conversations about how unhappy the public is with the huge advertisements people are getting on their e-mail interface. Another one is running on Google. It’s hard to find this page. I did a Google search on “annoying advertisements” after complaining to you and AT&T got me no where. I bet if “unlimited storage it’s coming” was easier to find you would be flooded with so many complaints about unwanted advertisement that you would quickly run out of room for the comments. This page would exceed the “unlimited capacity for storage”! Anyway, I don’t think you’re listening and I don’t think you care what we’re saying, and I think that is arrogant. Personally, I don’t like arrogance, and I don’t like unwanted advertisements. So if you don’t do anything, or at least respond to all the above people, I think by July 7 I will send you my last post: “Goodbye”.
nathan

S. Chuck | June 20th, 2007 at 8:57 am

Half-baked response by Yahoo = further customer disdain. So it appears this morning that my email home page now has a minimizing arrow for the skyscraper ad. This is how Yahoo responds to customers??? Huge ads still show up when you empty any folder, the button ads still exist, and for anyone who starts using the beta home page, surprise, surprise, the ads are about 3″ x 4″ square. When is Yahoo going to wake up – YOU’VE RUINED BOTH THE EMAIL AND HOME PAGE BETA INTERFACES WITH ADS, AND MANAGED TO ALIENATE PAYING AND FREE USERS ALL IN ONE FELL SWOOP. Good job, no . . . GREAT job in showing just how out of touch Yahoo and ATT are with consumer expectations. It is going to be a blood bath when ATT and Yahoo start delivering this ad interface through Go Mobile.

Tim | June 20th, 2007 at 10:02 am

Maybe the complaints were noticed. I went to my beta mail and there was an arrow on the side about half way down on the list that hides the advertisements on the side.

Benoit | June 20th, 2007 at 10:46 am

Hi! It isn’t solved that all cause as soon as you click on another email message the add comes back!

Still the same ugly and intrusive adds for Yahoo/ATT dsl PAYING customers. And of course no answer from Yahoo management….

Is Yahoo trying to kill itself and instead of fighting the war against Google! It is sad….

Damien | June 20th, 2007 at 4:57 pm

Wow, what a fix. The hide arrow is useless. As soon as you click on your next message, the ads come right back. What about the smaller ads? What’d the deal Yahoo? Stop half assing and get ride of the ads…

nathan | June 20th, 2007 at 8:50 pm

Hey! How about that! Something new!!! I’m reading my e-mail and a blue box comes up on top of the mail and floats around asking if I wanted to give my opinion about something – a stealth ad? NO I DON’T WANT TO DO AN OPIONION POLL ON TOP OF MY E-MAIL! How annoying! How rude!

Eric N. | June 21st, 2007 at 11:20 am

I could care less about having more than 2GB of storage. It’s the dang ads that make me angry. I’m using ATT Yahoo DSL (meaning I’m paying for it) and now I get a feature called ads. I’m seriously thinking of switching to Gmail where the interface is less cluttered. Free users should get ads, it makes sense, but not paying members.

Jim Del Favero | June 21st, 2007 at 11:56 am

Taking a bad customer experience and driving it even further into the ground.

I close the side bar, resize my columns so they fit again, then open an email, go back to the message list and voila, ad is back and I can’t see the columns I resized.

How is this a solution to anything? It actually makes it worse because it gives people the false impression that they can customize their workspace.

How about this for a solution. Give us the option of paying a small fee to get rid of the ads. $5 a year. Just grow a pair and come out and ask for the money.

ArtB | June 21st, 2007 at 12:40 pm

I posted here a few weeks ago about how the new Yahoo Mail Beta client (with ads everywhere) is terrible. I am a paying SBC Yahoo DSL subscriber…. it costs me $60 a month to have SBC DSL because I need to buy a phone line that I don’t even use.

What a waste.

The ads were supposed to increases revenue… well, they are backfiring.

These are the steps I have taken since the ads came into effect:

1. Switch back to original Yahoo mail.
- This only lasted about 2 days. I couldn’t handle it… It’s such an inferior email client to the beta or stand-alone program like Outlook. Thus…

2. I began using Outlook as my email client (instead of the Yahoo webmail) with my Yahoo mail as my only “account” in Outlook
- But there’s a big problem with this… It is with emails to/from people with @msn.com or @hotmail.com email addresses… for some reason they take about 12 hours to receive or send…. it only happens when I use outlook… if I send directly thru Yahoo webmail it goes right away. It’s still a major problem. Email shouldn’t take 12 hours to receive. I had this exact same problem about 7 years ago when I was using Eudora as my Yahoo email client. I though it was a problem with Eudora, so I began using the yahoo web client again and did until about 2 weeks ago. Now that I’ve switched to Oulook, the problem is back. I AM CONVINCED THAT YAHOO PURPOSEFULLY DELAYS EMAILS TO/FROM MSN/HOTMAIL ACCOUNTS TO TRY AND DETER PEOPLE FROM USING AND SUPPORTING MICROSOFT. That is terrible. If that is in fact true, Yahoo has bigger problems than annoying ads of old grumpy men taking up half my screen.

3. Anyway, I finally came around and decided to cancel my ATT YAHOO DSL. I was paying $60 a month, which is a ton these days. I figured it was worth it for the nice email client in the Yahoo Mail Beta. Now that I don’t use that anymore (I use Outlook), I figure: What is the point of paying $60 for internet service when I don’t even get the advantages it provided?

4. I have signed up for Comcast Cable Internet.

–> Way to go Yahoo. I’m through with you for good. I will never see any of your ads in the mail client b/c I will never use Yahoo webmail again. Terrible.

And the best part is… It all came with NO WARNING.

Tom D | June 21st, 2007 at 4:19 pm

I don’t need unlimited email space. That is just a ridiculous marketing gimmick. I am not anywhere close to using up the previous 2GB I had before this marketing gimmick.

If you think this unlimited e-mail gimmick is a good trade-off for the advertisements, think again! These advertisements are slap in the face to paying customers!

Sheila Dougan | June 21st, 2007 at 6:25 pm

Terrible way to treat your customers. With the TV we can use MUTE but with email it’s right in our face. Get rid of the ads they are all JUNK. Ads are annoying and that is why we use pop-up blockers, but you have us imprisoned with no way out of your trash.

Maria R | June 21st, 2007 at 8:31 pm

Lose the ads, ATT/Yahoo marketing fools, or lose your customers. It’s that simple. How many customers are you willing to lose? How many are you willing to send to your competitors before you learn?

I’m astounded by your arrogance. We have a choice, or have your forgotten? You are providing a service, if the service stops, our relationship will end. Watch your bottom line and learn, you fools.

Google Mail Fan | June 21st, 2007 at 9:12 pm

I agree with the other comments. I thought I’d add an interesting note…..

After submitting a complaint on AT&T’s web site, I received a call from the customer service department. The gentleman asked if the service was working as expected, and I told him everything except email….if he could remove the advertisements in the email, then I’d be happy. He actually laughed, then apologzied for the ads, and said that he has received those comments all day, every day for the past week.

He then went on to say that the advertisements were Yahoo’s decision, not AT&T’s and that AT&T didn’t have control over Yahoo’s decisions (blah,blah,blah). I told him that AT&T’s customers perceive it to be an AT&T issue and people are leaving both AT&T DSL and Yahoo email as a result. He was nice and understanding, but said all he could do was to continue to raise the concerns to management.

He also said, which was the same formal response in the AT&T support ticket, to switch to outlook express to avoid Yahoo’s ads.

nathan | June 22nd, 2007 at 12:36 am

for those of you who plan to switch to Comcast, maybe you should do a search on the following: “Yahoo, Comcast Sign Ad Deal. April 30 2007.”

Marco | June 22nd, 2007 at 5:00 am

Very upset with the add as I am a paying ATT customer, I think the marketing department should be fired!!

Also I have been getting more spam and this is due to the Yahoo/ATT servers as it interprets the misspelled address and sends it to that customer with the closest spelling. I have complained to ATT in the past if they reject misspelled email addresses spam would decrease tremendously. My company can do this, I guess the network engineers are incompetent of being able to do such a thing.

Tom D | June 22nd, 2007 at 6:18 am

Let me add something else to the mix. I probably won’t drop my AT&T DSL service because I have had a good experience with it. However, my local cable company offers everything AT&T does, plus a service bundle which includes my cable TV, cable Phone, cable ISP, and ZERO advertisements. I am considered somewhat of a computer guru by friends and family and I have always pushed them to use DSL over the local cable service. I am responsible for many DSL installations in my little group of friends, who I am sure are also responsible for spreading the word through social networks.

Now that I get advertising with my email, I am now totally soured on my AT&T/Yahoo! High Speed Internet (aka DSL) service. Yahoo’s actions, and their responses to long time customers, are customer unfriendly. When friends and family now ask me about an internet service provider my response will now be;

“Go with cable, it costs a bit more but you don’t get advertising with the service. If you want DSL for the cheaper cost, don’t use their email service.”

PS: Google is now my home page and I plan on using Yahoo’s forwarding feature to forward my email there. That will give me plenty of time to switch to the new email address. Before these yahoo’s will listen, they obviously need to lose business. Less hits on their web sites mean less revenue.

BYE BYE Yahoo!

Floyd | June 22nd, 2007 at 7:33 am

Hey all,

I just got my new service installed and am so far very happy with it. Notably faster (oddly, Yahoo Mail took the longest time to load of anywhere I’ve been yet), and more channels on my TV too.

I wanted to relate a story about another company that lost touch with it’s users. Juno. Anyone remember them? They started with a user friendly principle, that e-mail should be free. They got bought up, and had to start putting ads in the interface, and while at first still acceptible, they ultimately began to charge users for downloading their own e-mails. This basically killed them off.
If you were to go to Juno.com today, you’d see a mail interface not unlike Yahoo’s current one. Complete with the little ‘college degree’ type text ads for Phoenix university, etc. What you won’t see is that obnoxious right side banner. In one swift move, Yahoo has dropped it’s standards for paying customers below the level of service provided by a free, but now essentially ‘dead’ service. To me, this shows a fundamental inability to evaluate the user. Those of you thinking of switching, my experience has been a sigh of relief. The Google/Comcast combo is a winning one for me. I’ll still check in on Yahoo, but I expect to be laughing and surfing on more often than being impressed. I am a heavy Yahoo Groups user, but now I’m scared for that too. Their latest rollouts of new features have all been a hinderance to my use of Groups rather than a help. I expect to need a new groups-service provider in the near future too. Don’t get me started on the “OMG!” service Yahoo has stooped to. All this adds up to one conclusion: desperation.
Yahoo is failing, and they know it. Sticking it to the users and grabbing at tawdry markets like entertainment gossip screams it, in my opinion. Sad to see. I wish Yahoo well, and I hope they can learn their lesson. AOL learned it hard too, but they appear to have learned it at least. Best of luck.

AT&T? Heck, those dinosaurs just had it coming.

-Floyd, ex-Yahoo/AT&T customer

Wayne | June 22nd, 2007 at 10:26 am

Unlimited email storage is a joke. My work email server allows 1gb of storage and I currently have over 5,000 messages in my inbox, many with attachments. I would like to meet someone who uses Yahoo Mail and has hit the 2gb limit. So, unlimited email storage is the reason for ads showing up in email now? Take your unlimited email storage back please and give back my ad free email!!!

I am also an AT&T/Yahoo DSL subscriber and VERY UPSET that these ads are now bogging down my computer as I check my email. When I signed up for SBC/Yahoo years ago one of the benefits was ad-free web-based email. Now that has been taken away.

Also, I was paying $12.95 for DSL service then when my year was up it jumped to $19.95. That means AT&T is now getting an extra $7 a month for THE SAME “world-class” service and shoving ads down my throat.

I guess the good thing about the service now is not being locked in for a contract period so I’m free to find another service that doesn’t ignore their paying customers.

Yahoo is beginning to fall on hard times this may cause them and AT&T to fall further.

Kathy | June 22nd, 2007 at 11:08 am

The big, obnoxious advertisements you are littering all over my e-mail account pages are no different to me than spam. Everyday I am seeing new ads from your advertisers about “ugly credit” or “bad credit” and all kinds of other garbage. I am a PAYING CUSTOMER. The advertisements are UNSOLICITED. I can’t believe you are taking money from other companies so that you can spam your own customers. And of those companies think they’re going to generate sales by trashing up my private e-mail account space, they’re nuts.

georgec | June 22nd, 2007 at 1:49 pm

I too am most unhappy with the large ads, as well as the small ads. I investigated, and paid extra for the no-ads feature. Seems like a bait ‘n’ switch to now add the advertisements.

It may take a while, but I’ll look at others. Transferring my domain from a Yahoo business domain to godaddy.com looks like a potential solution, in that it is cheaper and no ads.

I’ll wait just a bit though. Let’s see if the new Yahoo CEO is more user-conscious.

Kathy S. | June 22nd, 2007 at 4:36 pm

World class service?? Is this the new mantra at Yahoo now?

I’m absolutely HORRIFIED by the ads. I called the customer service a bunch of times and I get the same generic answer “world class service” and “we need the ads to provide a low cost service.” Um, excuse me, WHY the heck do I, as a paid customer, have to pay for the unlimited space that appears to be offered only to the people that have free Yahoo mail anyways?! I’m still left with my 2 gig limit and now I even have to stare at the flashing Geico lizard- nice job Yahoo!

I hope that your analysts took into account that your customer base will shrink significantly when they did a revenue projection. Is it really worth it? I would sure love to see those pro formas.

Oh, and you just lost another loyal customer (not that you care anyway).

Rob Becker | June 22nd, 2007 at 7:09 pm

Yahoo never provides World Class Service. I canceled my Small Business Web Hosting account because of their unbelievably horrible tech support…and this was for a business customer!

As for the advertising being shoved down our throats, has anyone else noticed that it gets a little hard to compose a message? It’s as if the keyboard stops working. Here’s what I typed into a new e-mail message as a test. I was trying to type “testing” repeatedly.

testing esting testing testingtesting testing tesing testing testing tstn tsting testing estin testin testing testing

This only happens in the “new” Yahoo Mail Beta with Unlmited Mail You Didn’t Necessarily Need (Because We Needed To Put A Positive Spin On Ads You Most Certainly Hate).

I’d get support, but there’s not a chance in hell of getting any help with an issue like this.

CK | June 23rd, 2007 at 5:37 am

Another harsh complaint here about the ads on the pay Yahoo mail site.

These are really bad, amongst the most disrespectful and intrusive kinds of Internet ads — huge, animated, gaudy, and for poor products.

The Yahoo brand has done itself a huge disservice with this shift to the ads. I’m looking into alternatives for my mail and therefore DSL, etc., and I’m sure I’m far from alone with that.

Jay | June 24th, 2007 at 3:08 pm

I’ll join the outraged customers with regards to the obtrusive ads now in the Yahoo! Mail client. I’m a paying (emphasis on PAYING) AT&T customer (formally SBC) and I feel the same way everyone else does. I think of the Yahoo! Mail client as part of the services I pay for. Putting ads into that service is insulting at best. The fact that the ads COMPLETELY disable my ability to use the service (the right bar squish my content window down to nearly nothing) just infuriates me.

There are SO many things they could do to keep the ads but still make them unobtrusive.

1) Get rid of the damn right side ad bar. The entire thing needs to go.
2) Keep the ads BELOW the folder list.
3) Let us choose categories for ads we might be remotely interested in. (this 25 year old male doesn’t care 1 bit about wrinkle reduction cream)

Of course, getting rid of them altogether would be preferred.

Jay | June 24th, 2007 at 3:43 pm

Oh wow! Check out gmail http://mail.google.com

Goodbye Yahoo! Mail.

Blob | June 25th, 2007 at 8:31 am

I HATE the ads, the slow loads, the re-entering of passwords for no good reason (no, it’s NOT my browser cookie settings, different sessions, etc.

Rob Becker | June 25th, 2007 at 9:56 am

John Kremer, you have disappeared for some reason. It’s ironic that you have this message at the bottom of the page:

“wield spam and you’re banished forever”

So you don’t want unwanted advertising on your blog, but we get to look at it in our e-mail? I know, I know…you’re giving us “unlimited storage” and “world class service.” People aren’t stupid.

Most people don’t need or care about unlimited storage – and most people know that this little ploy was meant to redirect attention away from the ad “trade off.”

As for “world class service”, how is this defined? Does any company the size of Yahoo provide world class service?

I might start plugging my businesses here just because I can. That’s the logic Yahoo is using, right? At least one of us is actually paying for the right to spam – and that would be me.

Tim Joiner | June 25th, 2007 at 11:53 am

I, too, am genuinely disappointed at the ads on the webmail page. If they must be there, they should be small and unobtrusive, such as the ones below the folder list. But there shouldn’t be any ads at all, since I am a paying customer. Ads help pay for free services, and I am happy to accept them there, but on a paid account they leave the impression that I’m freeloading and not carrying my weight as a customer. This is offensive.

The disingenuous excuses you have offered, such as that they are helping you provide us with such great service, and that the negative feedback over them has been minimal, only serve as a slap in the face and are an insult to our intelligence.

I’m a retired computer technician, and I still help many seniors in my area with their day to day computer problems. I’ve already been emailed by four of them asking how they can get rid of those huge ugly ads. One informed me she was canceling her DSL account and going back to dial up, because this was the final straw.

This is yet another bad business decision by a company infamous for bad business decisions.

Tim Joiner
Little Rock, Arkansas

andyo | June 25th, 2007 at 4:18 pm

Well, the MOST DISRESPECTFUL THING that I find here is that free users are being given unlimited storage AT OUR EXPENSE. Are they also being given “world class service”? cause I can’t tell. I guess Yahoo makes more money from advertising in free accounts than us paying? What is the difference now between paying and non-paying accounts? POP mail? Yeah right that’s a joke. At least give us back IMAP.

moisme | June 25th, 2007 at 5:54 pm

Hate the ads.

I’ve been paying for DSL, local phone and prior to that dial up through SBC/ATT/Yahoo for many many years.

HATE the ads!!

Never been thrilled with the customer service but have had limited good options for price and access. This is yet another thing to prompt me to move to another provider as soon as its feasible.

HATE THE ADS!!!!

Chad | June 26th, 2007 at 9:54 am

I’m a paying AT&T Yahoo customer. The ads in my email are unacceptable. Once my contract is up, if the ads remain, I will be taking my business elsewhere.

MH | June 26th, 2007 at 11:39 am

The ads are atrocious — and they take a LONG time to load. They have completely trashed an email product that was so-so to begin with.

AT&T/Yahoo showed a complete lack of respect for their customers when they decided to load up the email interface with these awful ads.

AT&T/Yahoo, please remove the ads. I pay for DSL service — I shouldn’t be subjected to this kind of customer abuse.

schuck | June 26th, 2007 at 12:27 pm

Do you marketing gurus realize that you’ve made it worse by forcing us to minimize the skyscraper ad each time a new email page is accessed???? And the load time for each page is now glacially slow. More negative interaction with the ads. You guys can’t see the forest for the trees. Wake up.

There’s a reason why it is a Beta interface – TO SOLICIT USER FEEDBACK!! Why not just admit you screwed up, failed to conduct the proper focus group testing, and fix it.

Dora | June 26th, 2007 at 7:14 pm

You keep removing my comments.

Again, I ask WHY WON’T YOU, John Kramer, or ANYONE at YAHOO respond to all of the comments on this blog?

What are you, Dick Cheney wannabees?

Erase this and you lose a long time customer.

nathan | June 27th, 2007 at 1:59 am

Look Yahoo. I really did like using the YM Beta e-mail before you covered it up with advertisements. I enjoyed and looked forward to looking at my e-mails. I considered it my personal place to relax and enjoy the messages from friends, family, and colleages. Now you’ve buried that e-mail space in a little 5 inch square box and turned the whole thing to “crap”. I really thought after you read all these messages that your customers sent you might do something about the mess. I had hope. But soon I will have to give up. In about a week or two. I will need to explore other e-mail servers I could choose from, either a free service like gmail, or something I would have to pay for like Outlook. Also, since AT&T is up there on the logo with Yahoo (and in a partnership with you), I may be open to a new phone service as well. What can I say. You ruined a good thing. That is not “world class service”. It is more like “third world service”

Gary L | June 27th, 2007 at 7:18 am

Has anyone noticed that the Yahoo spam filter is not working as well as it used to work? I am getting more and more spam in my inbox every day. What are the odds that we will soon be offered a “Super Spam Filter” for a slight increase in subscription cost?

Gary L | June 27th, 2007 at 8:56 am

John; I have been made aware through this blog that a Yahoo mail account can be free. I have been paying $19.95/ month for years for a dial up account that I actually connect to with a cable modem and cable service (switched from dial up to cable about 5 years ago). What am I getting now that I could not get with a free Yahoo mail account?

Thanks.

Floyd | June 27th, 2007 at 11:54 am

So what are you getting with paid you aren’t getting with Free? Internet acces, POP access, and that’s it. You can get net access elsewhere and gmail has POP features. Right now, that’s it. Aside from DSL service, AT&T/Yahoo have nothing seperating the mail service that come with DSL from the free Yahoo account.

Jim Del Favero | June 27th, 2007 at 2:42 pm

In response to Gary L.

“What am I getting now that I could not get with a free Yahoo mail account?”

You are getting World Class Service.

Jennifer Hines | June 28th, 2007 at 9:23 am

I understand that Yahoo has to pay for it’s “World Class Service” somehow, and more ads seem to be their answer. However, I draw the line at the ads at the top of my email inbox that are video in content (not just animated), and all one has to do to enable them is roll over the ad. No clicks, simply roll the curser over the ad and it starts playing. This is incredibly annoying and cuts into my productivity. In fairness, Yahoo has the right to sell these ads, but I also have the right to boycott the products of advertisers that pay Yahoo to post these ads. Are you listening Yahoo customers?

Rob Becker | June 28th, 2007 at 12:19 pm

The lack of response to the 220+ legitimate customer complaints on this blog entry demonstrates the World Class Service Yahoo provides. All of these customers are in one place and wanting more than the corporate song and dance provided by Kremer a couple of weeks back, yet Yahoo – in their quest to provide World Class Service – doesn’t make any effort at all to address these issues.

Irony and hypocrisy…

Gary L | June 28th, 2007 at 3:36 pm

Jennifer is right; boycott the products and services. Not only that, but e-mail the support departments of those vendors and tell them you doing so because of their intrusive, obnoxious ads.

nathan | June 28th, 2007 at 10:59 pm

Yahoo,
Now I have a smaller viewing space for e-mail and the e-mail is taking longer while it tries to download advertisements I don’t want to see. That’s right. Your “World Class Service” is slowing my computer down! Fix it.

Mike | June 29th, 2007 at 6:28 am

You have turned off a lot of customers with your new ad policy. I personally think that you have completely cheapened your image by this stunt. Charge me an extra 5 bucks a month, I’d rather have a clean/fast email account instead of a trashy slow ad page.

Gary | June 29th, 2007 at 11:28 am

I didn’t ask for unlimited storage – don’t need it. What I want is an email that doesn’t annoy the daylights out of me with huge skyscraper ads that take up half of the page every time I click the mouse.

I pay for AT&T Yahoo. If I wanted spam-filled, pop-up-filled, crappy email service, I’d go somewhere else.

Thanks Yahoo – you made up my mind for me. Your mail now offiially stinks and I will use gmail from now on.

Krista | June 30th, 2007 at 7:31 am

As a paying Yahoo/SBC DSL customer, it really pisses me off to have to have all these stinking ads in my email. First of all, I don’t want to look at some bogus photoshopped ad for a wrinkle cream or a gorilla beating it’s chest about home loans when I’m seeing if I have mail. I’m not buying anything from any ad you post. Secondly, I’m PAYING FOR THE SERVICE! If you want to advertise up the freebie emails, fine, but as a paying customer I shoudn’t have to see this crap. World class service? You mean the bucket loads of spam I get every day? The 500 blocked email allotment that I’ve long since filled up? Yahoo’s inability to recognize the subject line “a powful tool” as being the same ole virus spam mail that’s been circulating the net since oh, 2000?

I do have other options yanno. Yahoo SBC is hardly the only game in town. If these ads continue to appear in paying customer’s email accounts, I’ll be shopping for a new ISP real soon.

Jeff | July 2nd, 2007 at 11:09 pm

Add me to the list of of paying customers that you have pissed off with the obnoxious ads that fill up the screen. I’ve been using pacbell/SBC/AT&T/ what ever you are this week DSL for over 8 years and this will what finally pushes me over the the edge…

Step 1)
Remove the ads.

Step 2)
Fire the idiot in the marketing department that pitched this idea and the executives that endorsed it.

Floyd | July 3rd, 2007 at 2:55 pm

I don’t suspect John or any Yahoo is reading our comments here. I voted with my feet. Cable is much nicer, I must say. May be the only way to send a message they’ll hear.

John Mclane | July 3rd, 2007 at 8:50 pm

Ads are part of the ‘world class service’!?! Has anyone else noticed the significant increase in spam over the past two weeks as well? Is this part of the ‘world class service’?

I used to have a slick, email interface with maybe 10 spams in the spam box a week. I now get ‘world class service’ with ads all over the freaking place, 100+ spam emails in the spam box per week, and about 25 spam emails in the inbox per week.

Every time I open AT&T yahoo email now, I feel like someone is jabbing a pencil in my eye….and I’m paying them to do it.

Sam I am…
I don’t want ads in mail
I don’t want it slow as a snail
I don’t want all that spam
I don’t want green eggs and ham…….nor do I want AT&T or Yahoo anymore!

There once was a company named yahoo
they spammed their customers with ad poo
They tried to be frugal
and were bought out by google
and disappeared into the blue

Dave | July 4th, 2007 at 6:14 pm

It’s clear we all loved the old Yahoo Mail and it’s not coming back. I switched back to Google for mail the first day of the ad blitz a few weeks ago and I still miss my old mail. But there’s nothing else to do short of boycotting the Yahoo advertisers since Yahoo won’t listen. Has anyone proposed that yet?

Chris Porter | July 5th, 2007 at 2:38 pm

I thought I might be the only one who was experiencing this problem, hoping that somehow my “Yahoo Mail Plus” was somehow disabled when my SBC DSL contract ran out (about the same time these ads started appearing). I tried in vain to work with AT&T to find out what happened. The best their support person (some guy named “Mike”, sitting in a sweatshop somewhere in the middle of India) could do was suggest that I try switching back to the old interace, then switch again to the new interface and that would make the ads go away. Did it work, NO.

I’ve been debating for the last few months switching over to Cox Cable HSI but have held off because I was previously happy with SBC’s DSL service and I loved that I got Yahoo Mail Plus as part of my package. Now with the new “unlimited service” I get unlimited ads, slower loading interface, and no support when I call. All this for a service I do pay for. Funny thing when I log into Gmail (had my account for years but never moved to it), I see no ads at all. A free service runs faster, is easier to use, and has infinitely (Many Ads/No Ads = infinite number) less ads than “paid” service provider.

I WILL be moving my service to Cox Cable and using Gmail from this point forward. If I owned stock in Yahoo I would be dumping it faster than Worldcom when they declared bankruptcy. Then again, I probably would have sold it years ago when Yahoo lost to Google in almost every market they share.

I wanted to correct an analogy used by a previous poster on this blog:

“It is like me selling you a car that is supposed to have a nice stereo, then when you get it and find out it has an 8-track in it, telling you that we are trying to offer you a world class driving experience. What kind of garbage is that?”

I see this situation much more like buying the car with the great radio, driving home and on the way home it breaks into the middle of every song you are listening to with an advertisement for an acne solution/Viagra/college degree. I’m not saying between the songs like FREE radio stations use, I’m saying right in the middle of the song. It doesn’t matter if you are listening to the Radio, CD, MP3 player, or Satellite.

I WAS a happy SBC customer for the last 3 years and have been a loyal Yahoo Mail customer for closer to 10 years. Both have changed irreversibly in the last 2 months. You (AT&T and Yahoo) have lost me as a customer.

Chris Porter | July 5th, 2007 at 3:42 pm

Quick update: I have ordered my Cox service and in 1 week I will no longer be an AT&T customer. I give thanks to Yahoo for helping me make up my mind to move to a faster service for the same cost per month. I’m sure there are others that have done the same before me and I’m sure there are others who will do the same very soon. Hopefully someone from Yahoo/AT&T is actually reading the comments on their own blog and will realize this was a bad move and reverse it soon. Good luck and enjoy your ad ridden paid for email service.

andyo | July 5th, 2007 at 8:40 pm

Well if one thinks about it, it’s rational of Yahoo to do this. Imagine what they were thinking… “IF we do this, we will have a bunch of SBC customers complaining for a while, and just a very little portion of them will find another provider. It’s not like it’s much of Yahoo’s loss, it’s more like AT&T’s anyway. But the whole LOT of others who get their yahoo for free will see no such change and will welcome and praise us for their unlimited storage, which of course those annoyed people who will shut up in a month or two anyway, I mean, paying customers, are helping finance. That’s gotta help our image overall, and at the same time we’ll have an excuse to weasel in ads into every account.”

How nice of us paying customers are to sacrifice ourselves so free users can have their unlimited storage. I don’t care anymore about the ads, I’m using an email client now, but as soon as I find another DSL provider I’ll switch. Not that you care Yahoo people.

schuck | July 6th, 2007 at 2:34 pm

To Jerry Yang:

Your Company’s failure to respond is pathetic, and a patent indictment of management’s lack of vision and execution. Go ahead, mould Yahoo into an advertising jugernaut and watch your ISP/Portal market share dwindle even faster into nothingness. Yahoo is quickly ceasing to be relevant to the infrastructure of the internet.

Alexey Kats | July 7th, 2007 at 4:32 am

Could you, please, explain something to me? I have DSL service from AT&T (former SBC, former Pacific Bell) which comes with Yahoo services. Last time I checked (couple minutes ago, actually) my services include Yahoo Mail Plus. According to this page (http://mailplus.mail.yahoo.com/) the Mail Plus service is supposed to be ads free. But for some reason any time I try to use Yahoo Mail I am getting regular Yahoo Mail service, with all the bells and whistles… I mean with all the graphical and text advertisements. When I try to use Mail Plus by going to mailplus.yahoo.com all I am getting is service ORDERING form, which is weird since I already have it according to my account description.

So, what’s happened? Do I no longer have Mail Plus? If yes, then why? Do you no longer offer it? If yes, why do you still market it for $20/year?

Is it an attempt to double-charge for the same service I already have? (or should I say “HAD”?) I’d love to get back to 2GB limit I had, back to the same non-discounted price for the DSL package, as long as there are no advertisements as there were before. I do NOT want to buy a business account just to get rid of ads, and I am afraid some bottom-line-conscious idiot (let’s call things by their names) will decide to downgrade business accounts as well, in order to sell premium business accounts.

I hope someone can answer these questions for me, because it’s really frustrated when someone treats you like you are a dumb sheep unable to think.

Floyd | July 9th, 2007 at 2:53 pm

Alexey,

Yahoo made the changes in the e-mail interface you receive from them via AT&T, and neglected to update the description, among other negligent acts. I did receive an e-mail from one of them (no way to tell which service, think it was AT&T) that did mention the notice. It was hidden under the blurb about unlimited storage. This was well before the changes occurred, and I had about 2 months to try to dig up info on what was going to occur. If you never got an e-mail about this impending change, add it to the list of Bad Things Yahoo Did. What you are getting now is about like the free service, not the mail plus service. You can do POP, and of course you get internet access, but the mail interface is now the same as the free one. Switching to the pre-beta look makes it manageable, if you want to bother continuing paying for the same thing as the free version. I personally did not.

Floyd, former Yahoo user.

Janis | July 14th, 2007 at 4:24 pm

I thought I was the only angry voice out there. Every time I contacted ATT to complain I was told that they hadn’t heard any other complaints. Now I’ve found this blog and realize that was just BS. They have been advertising their new u-Verse service and I was actually interested until the email ads started to appear. Now I will be looking instead to my local cable service for a bundled package. Good bye ATT your “World Class Service” is just about to lose another customer.

David Powers | July 16th, 2007 at 8:07 pm

AT&T Yahoo!, you are fired!

I signed up with Comcast and had my new cable internet access installed, set up my new e-mail accounts and called AT&T Yahoo! customer service tonight to shut you off.

You literally gave my business away to Comcast for cheezy banner adds that I will now no longer have to see. And I must say, Comcast was very happy to take my business from you.

Oh, and the customer support person I talked to when I was firing you said I was the second one she talked to today about this.

Good bye, AT&T Yahoo! Enjoy your banner ad revenues. Who needs customers, right?

Dave, new Comcast Broadband Customer

Alexey Kats | July 17th, 2007 at 12:08 am

Thank you, Floyd, for explaining it in a calm voice. Funny thing, it does not even both Yahoo how many people are running Firefox with AdBlock, thus negating these ads completely, or almost completely. I guess having ads revenue is more important to Yahoo than having paying customers. Pity, what a pity…

The worst part is that annoyance just became yet another merchandise (or coercion?) Yahoo is selling, and it wants to get paid no matter what. My only question is what has happened with Yahoo/AT&T contracts, aren’t they supposed to be paid from AT&T accounts? If they are, that’s essentially a double or even triple dip – payment from AT&T fees, then payment from ads, then payments from customers who will buy extra service in order to get rid of ads. Bravo, Yahoo, nice job…

Donald Bell | July 22nd, 2007 at 6:34 am

I do not need unlimited space if you are going to bomb me with ads. The ads need to disappear out of my AT&T/Yahoo DSL email accounts by the end of July or I’m going to Cox.

After all, why pay you money and when I can get the same service for free. I can even unmerge my email accounts (http://helpme.att.net/article.php?item=6756) and that way my wife can keep her Yahoo email account if she wants.

Wayne Brenner | July 22nd, 2007 at 12:30 pm

Dear AT&T,
A couple of months ago, I ordered services for my home phone to limit the ten mortgage-quote calls I was getting per day. It has been some help. Thank you.

What a surprise that, two months later, it is now you sending mortgage ads to me, and taking away part of my computer screen to do it, like NetZero did with their free service. However, I am not a free customer – I am a customer who pays for your most expensive ‘Elite’ service. And unlike my home phone service, I cannot turn to you to limit the advertising, because now you are the provider of the ads. You can surely understand how I feel about that, without further explanation.

I want the right side of my monitor screen returned!

Ramsey | July 25th, 2007 at 10:09 am

When my contract is up, I am gone. Congratulations, you’ve managed to accomplish the biggest blunder in business : lose a loyal 4 year paying customer. I am not paying for ads.

What a joke. Your “new” beta home page’s main difference? Bigger space for the ads! Nope, sorry. August cannot come any sooner for me.

Google is free, offers a fantastic email service, and their ads aren’t even as obtrusive. Not to mention it’s no secret that their search engine is far superior to yours. (You guys lost me on that one years ago, sorry.) I’d bet they actually might listen to their user base a little more.

I would highly recommend to anyone reading this that you NOT RENEW YOUR CONTRACT. A consumer’s most powerful weapon is their wallet.

Rob Becker | July 26th, 2007 at 5:25 am

My last comment mysteriously never made it to the light of day. Interesting.

I would like to inform Yahoo that their webmail client for mobile phones does not work…and has not for three days now. Is this part of the “World Class Service” we’re supposed to see thanks to the spam – sorry – advertising we (paying DSL customers) get to see (like it’s a privilege) while using our Yahoo Mail?

So not only do you ignore the complaints of people on this blog, the people who have called in, and the countless people who probably don’t waste their time with trying to contact your crack “World Class Service” team, but you can’t even provide “World Class Service” when it comes to the quality of your products.

Why am I using the mobile mail client instead of Yahoo Go? Because the first version would go weeks if not months without actually synching up my e-mail. And because version 2.0 for my phone has been “coming soon” per your website forever. World class?

Oh, yeah…have I mentioned how the “improved” Yahoo Mail Beta – the one with the visual spam forced upon subscribers – likes to load twice? Once to load your mailbox, and a second reload of your mailbox in order to load the obnoxious ad banner on the right.

It’s a shame I trashed the e-mail long ago from Yahoo that announced “no ads” for the webmail client…

Steve | July 26th, 2007 at 6:21 pm

Unfortunately, the email service is laced with ads. You are allowed to minimize the ad, but it seems that upon every click thereafter the ad returns. They should have allowed you to minimize the ads once per session, without it reappearing. This sucks!!!!!

patti haskins | July 27th, 2007 at 3:42 pm

I hate the ads on my email page. Make it go away. I do not pay to have ads all over as I try to read my email. Make it go away.

Tom D | July 31st, 2007 at 9:16 am

This is not AT&T’s problem. This is all Yahoo’s problem. AT&T’s only problem is using Yahoo for to provide email services. I am keeping my AT&T DSL service, which has been rock solid for years, and tons better then Cable service during prime time, and switching to Google mail. Maybe if we all keep complaining, AT&T will just drop Yahoo all together.

mcrunch | August 7th, 2007 at 11:34 am

Just what i always wanted – i was getting anxious at 1% usage! /sarcasm.
Anyway, yahoo mail is pretty good as-is.

Bill S. | August 8th, 2007 at 6:00 am

I continue to be amazed at the lack of respect ATT/Yahoo has for the intelligence of it’s exisiting customers. They are driving people away in droves. Isn’t it less costly to retain a customer rather than convert one?

I can’t bail from Yahoo right away but here is what I am doing to prepare for it:
1) I used to leave my mail window open all the time. The spam/ads are so obnoxious now that now I grab my mail and get out quick. Beta was a slick interface until the garbage arrived.
2) I’ve started to go through and clean up my mail archives in preparation for transfering them to my hard drive. I don’t care how much storage I get if I have to look at dancing aliens everytime I pickup my mail.
3) I’ve purchased a domain and set up an email forward from it. When I switch out, probably this winter, I just change the forwarding location for my email, probably to Gmail, and it’s adios Yahoo.

Unbelievable!

Gina | August 8th, 2007 at 7:36 pm

This is the first time I’ve come across here and I have a couple of questions.

I’ve read a few of the messages above. For those of you who have Yahoo Mail Plus, are all of you still getting advertisements EVEN though you are paying $20? I was just about to switch—now I’m glad I didn’t do that yet!!!!! I thought when we are paying customers, we don’t get advertisements??????????????????

And my next question. For those of you who already have Yahoo Mail Plus, does it look and work like Beta or does it look and work like the Original Yahoo?

I have Aol mail, yahoo beta and gmail. However I don’t use gmail often because it is always full of spam bigtime, just like the old yahoo had!!! That was the main thing I liked about the new yahoo beta because I notice spam is much better controlled, however I can’t handle all the advertisments much longer. Now, if gmail would get their spam under control, I’d switch over to them for good.

Gina

nathan | August 8th, 2007 at 9:44 pm

The Yahoo Beta Mail looked great early this summer, and did the whole year I used it. Then in June it was destroyed by banner adds and other adds all over the e-mail interface. Yahoo told us it was (to pay) for “World Class Service”. Now the e-mail has even gotten worse: It takes longer to open into that tiny window in the middle of the ads. Yahoo gleefully anounced the coming of “Unlimited Storage”, which became the forum of bitter complaints by it’s OWN PAYING CUSTOMERS – most of the 250 plus comments are angry about the ugly ads. Now it’s slowing down. And Yahoo does nothing to respond to those who once were it’s dedicated fans. So where are the commentaries now? Surely there must be another place where ad weary users of the net are venting their frustration. I’m still frustrated after two months. Are you? Andyo, Schuck, Floyd, Jim Del Favero, Rob Becker, Gary L, do you still read this commentary. Or did you give up on Yahoo? I could understand if you did. But I’ll bet you’re still unhappy like me. Has anyone heard of a new Window Beta e-mail?

Dreaming | August 9th, 2007 at 3:19 am

Someone mentioned above that they thought it would be preferable for Yahoo DSL to raise their prices instead of bombarding people with ads. PLEASE – NO !!! I would rather have the ads. For those of us who cannot afford higher prices, it’s the only way. I have dial-up right now, and I’m considering Yahoo DSL because in my remote area, I have very limited options. For me, it’s either that or no internet service at all, because I can no longer tolerate dial-up. What they need to do is offer an option to choose either, that way everyone will be happy. Please let us choose whether we want cheaper DSL with ads, or more expensive DSL without them. HOWEVER, in my opinion, the DSL is expensive enough already and they should be able to offer it ad free, but that obviously is not going to happen….so give people a choice Yahoo!

mcrunch | August 9th, 2007 at 6:27 am

Actually, I would like to see filters so one could automatically receive certain emails in certain folders. pop mail would be nice too. The spam guards are great.

Floyd | August 9th, 2007 at 9:25 am

Gina,

This is applying to those people who pay for internet access through AT&T/Yahoo and whatever other names they go by. I don’t know if regular Plus customers get ads or not. That’s why ppl are so POed is that they are paying and still getting ads.
Plus Yahoo didn’t distinguish between Plus on its own, and Plus with DSL, so people think it applies to ALL Plus accounts. It also says on their sites that DSL customers get Plus, and DSL customers have the ads, soooo, now people think ALL Plus customers have ads. Poor implementation all around.

I recommend creating a new gmail account. Mine hardly gets any spam, so I must be lucky so far. Once your address is compromised though, there’s no going back. With Yahoo, I get over 100 a day in my bulk folder, plus at least 1-3 that slip past the filters. Yahoo actually hired someone to be a Y-Mail ‘community manager’ now, full time, so maybe he can get the message to the higher (pun intended) ups.

Good luck!

Zaq | August 9th, 2007 at 11:00 am

I’ve had the same Yahoo mail account for ten years now. First, I paid the $20/yr fee to remove the ads. Then, when I signed up for SBC DSL, I got ad-free email included.

You know, since I was paying $25/mo. for it, and funding their business.

I continue to pay monthly, but now I get the extreme pleasure of lining the pockets of questionable mortgage companies with advertising revenue. Oh, goodie!

This is an absolute travesty.

Way to crap on your paying customers, Yahoo.

Gary L | August 9th, 2007 at 11:16 am

I have opened up a free Yahoo E-mail account, in addition to the one I am paying for right now. The interface is identical; I can’t tell the difference. I just need to get the nerve to try and change my E-mail address, from *Prodigy.net* to Yahoo.com. I have had the prodigy address since 1989 and according to AT&T that is all I am now paying for.

I use Mozilla Firefox instead of IE and it gets rid of most of the ads.

Gary L | August 9th, 2007 at 11:36 am

In preparation for canceling my AT&T Yahoo account and going the the free Yahoo service, can someone explain how to get the mail in my current folders into the folders in the other account (other that forwarding them one at a time)?

Thanks

Cindy R | August 9th, 2007 at 5:53 pm

I am very surprised at the number of comments on this site claiming that Yahoo Mail Plus has begun adding ads. For the record, I have had a Yahoo Mail Plus account (the $20/yr deal) for almost one year and it continues to be AD FREE! Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about AT&T YAHOO mail. Our household email address which is an sbcglobal.net address began introducing ads several weeks ago – TOTALLY OBNOXIOUS, DISGUSTING, ANNOYING to say the least! I would also like to point out something that I have observed in the past and continue to observe, if you login to a Yahoo Mail Plus account, the main headers on every page are: Mail Plus, Addresses, Calendar, Notepad but if you login to an AT&T YAHOO mail account the headers are exactly the same except for the first one which is Mail, NOT Mail Plus. This in no way exonerates AT&T YAHOO – PLEASE OH PLEASE REMOVE THOSE ADS !!!!!

Gina | August 9th, 2007 at 6:55 pm

I’ve created an account with Inbox.com It looks like a good email service so far but we will see. Has 5GB storage and is pretty quick. I haven’t seen any advertisements yet. It lacks a few things, but overall I like the look and it has alot of extras. I found it when I found an article on the ‘top 10 free email services’ at this link along with other email services (sadly yahoo was one of them, but I wouldn’t think for long the way things are looking): http://email.about.com/od/freeemailreviews/tp/free_email.htm

Gina

Karl McHorton | August 11th, 2007 at 12:49 pm

So, as a paying AT&T DSL subscriber you get: POP access and enhanced security included in the DSL price.

We also get the horrendous adverts – it’s an appalling
decision.

To fix the advertising issue I *think* the answer will be to
dissociate the yahoo accounts from AT&T service, and
pay yahoo directly $20 per year to suppress the adverts.

Anyone know how to dissociate?

Karl

Floyd | August 14th, 2007 at 1:46 pm

Comment by Gary L

“In preparation for canceling my AT&T Yahoo account and going the the free Yahoo service, can someone explain how to get the mail in my current folders into the folders in the other account (other that forwarding them one at a time)?”

Answer by Floyd (because friends don’t let friends use Yahoo Answers)
You have two options that I know of. One, download your messages, folder by folder to your machine and open them using outlook express. I did this route myself, and so far, no problems. I think it explains itself to you when you go to do it, IIRC.

I would do this as a backup plan. Second option is to ask Yahoo if you can keep it as a free account. I know when I cancelled my paid Juno account, they let me keep it as a free account forever more. Yahoo said, when I cancelled mine, that it stays as a free account for (30 days?) and then the entire profile (meaning any yahoogroup subscriptions you have with that addy, and any other Yahoo service profiles) goes bye-bye entirely. So be prepared for a “no” answer, as it sounds like it’s linked to your customer account with AT&T irrevocably. If they are so many *years* behind even Juno that they can’t convert you over, I would question the quality of service they can offer you, even as a freebie customer.

Floyd | August 14th, 2007 at 1:50 pm

Karl,

See my above response to Gary. I think you will have to cancel one and start another, but I think in those cases, where you are switching from one paid service to another, Yahoo would be more willing (not necessarily any more *able*) to help you out. Call them up and ask, I think.

-Floyd
(who is frighteningly obsessed with this issue, for reason)

Andrew L. Rubman, ND | August 24th, 2007 at 1:00 pm

John – When I first saw the mail page ads (skyscraper right, folder buttons left) I complained to AT&T C/S and they patched in a script to kill the ads. A few weeks later an “update” came through that re-enabled the ads. My wife and I are both doctors, travel extensively, and rely on an uncluttered, fast loading iMAP email server. What you have in place is unacceptable. We pay monthly for your highest speed connection and have been loyal to your service, resisting the pressure from the local cable provider. What you do with your business is certainly your decision to make, but how about a personal email with an ad-killer script? Thanks for your attention to this.

Shirley Koelling | August 29th, 2007 at 6:41 pm

Do we get a refund from the $20 already paid?

Deb | August 31st, 2007 at 5:14 pm

I think just about all big business is greedy and don’t actually care about quality customer service. Otherwise, we would not have to put up with intrusive, ugly ads that trudge through our homepages and email from our PAID DSL accounts. I ‘d like to find a fair-priced DSL provider without ads all over, if one exists.

Cythera | September 10th, 2007 at 6:01 pm

First, I didn’t read any comments already written except for maybe the first few.

Amazing, but this doesn’t necessarily we actually have unlimited space. It’s just that we don’t have a solid limit like 1 gig. We can freely use up space that was supposed to be other’s if we still had those solid lines. For a person that barely emails anyone, 1 gigabyte is a pain to use up. Now other people can just use it up for that particular person.

In my opinion, this isn’t the best way to compete with other email providers, but I guess it works in some ways. It just sounds nice overall, as if we can actually use a terabyte of email. Or even more, a petabyte.

Keith | September 11th, 2007 at 11:36 pm

please just stop the advertising on my email browser.
PLEASE.

Floyd | September 13th, 2007 at 1:41 pm

FYI to user cancelling paid services with AT&T Yahoo:

Yahoo very nicely converted my pacbell.net account to a new ID using the free e-mail version, and it auto-imported all my mail and contacts, etc.

So there’s one plus side to switching. You will likely be able to keep your items online, rather than having to download them before they are zapped. I still have no plans to use Yahoo mail, but thought you all might like to know. Not sure what variables factor in to that, so don’t count on it, maybe I’m getting a special deal or something, who knows. Anyway, I love my new e-mail account on another service, and won’t be back til the clue is caught. Cheers!

-Floyd

Balbeer Singh Choudhary | September 14th, 2007 at 9:57 pm

i am so happy to know that Yahoo! had allocated an unlimited Email storage space to its users. So i had switched from rediff to Yahoo! All the best for all Yahoo members.

:Balbeer Singh Choudhary

Andrew | September 22nd, 2007 at 11:12 am

I hate those little promotional taglines at the end of our outgoing messages. They look so unprofessional. That is why I use Gmail. I really like Yahoo’s new mail interface, but I just don’t like the taglines.

I know that a lot of people switch to Yahoo Mail and Hotmail because they don’t like the way Gmail searches their messages to display text ads. But, I think it would be a lot better if Yahoo displayed text ads instead of the blinking, annoying flash ads. The text ads wouldn’t have to be relevant to the emails, that way Yahoo wouldn’t search the messages.

Wayne Brenner | September 29th, 2007 at 7:57 am

A few months ago, I had called my phone service provider, AT&T, to see what could be done about receiving ten refinance calls a day. Customer service was helpful in providing some solutions to the problem.
Then the same company, AT&T, in partnership with Yahoo, takes away part of my email page with refinance ads! I sure was amazed that my phone company/ISP, who were claiming to be helpful, were now treating the same as a NetZero customer, even though I pay for their most expensive internet service.
If I want to check my mail, while away from home, on a smaller monitor, the ads stay the same size, everything else shrinks.
All this, to pay for unlimited storage? If I need more storage, I would be willing to pay for it.
Thank you.

nathan | October 3rd, 2007 at 12:53 am

The Dermatage Advertisements are back! GROSS, REALLY GROSS! Yahoo please make the advertisements go away from the e-mail. It makes it really hard to use the e-mail because it slows it down a lot. And people in real life are not as ugly as those in the Dermatage advertisements!

Tom | October 12th, 2007 at 2:09 pm

The advertising on the AT&T/Yahoo email interface is atrocious. A major distraction, in the most unpleasant sense. Lately, it appears to be kludging up the email program as well. Sometimes that banner ads will load, but not the rest of the page. Requires hitting the ‘refresh’ button to get the whole page back. When ads start to compromise the user-friendliness and efficiency of the mail program, it makes me wonder why I’m using it. Ditto for my business, other family & relatives.
Please, lose the ads, or you will continue to lose valued and faithful customers.

Lorenzo | October 30th, 2007 at 6:01 pm

I cannot believe that you would force obtrusive ads on your long time paying customers!!

This is outrageous…and I want to go find another service!

SHAME ON YOU!

Greg | November 8th, 2007 at 4:33 am

I am glad I stumbled on to this page. I was so disappointed when I saw the all of the advertising in my email window. Looks like they are trying to drive paying customers off. Glad to see I am not alone in my complaints. Unfortunately, I live out in the country and have few options for internet access and phone service. I was completely satisfied until this issue. I am searching hard for better options and can’t wait to drop AT&T.

Jeanne | November 8th, 2007 at 8:01 pm

I’ve written to customer service twice over the summer about the horrible banner ads. I still hate them. Do you think we are going to get use to them? When is Yahoo going to add sound to the ads to make our experience even more unpleasant?

I agree with Tom. Now the top banner ad loads, but not the rest of the page, so I have to sit here and refresh the screen. It is so annoying.

I never open my home page and try to go through my e-mail as quick as I can, so I can close the offensive AT&T Yahoo e-mail system. Hate it.

nathan | November 9th, 2007 at 2:43 am

yahoo. you know the more bells and whistles you keep putting on the e-mail, the more clogged down it gets. whole words dissapear if i back up to erase one letter, and when entering into my e-amil I went into a home page i didn’t ask to be sent to and the log-in dissapeared, so I had to take time out to change all the settings back to what I wanted. can’t you just leave well enough alone, get rid of the obtrusive banner ads, and make it the efficient, peaceful interface that was your wonderful e-mail in summer? please?

Patrick | November 29th, 2007 at 2:31 pm

It’s really a shame – I had been using ATT Yahoo mail for a few years. Then we get the email excitedly telling us about unlimited storage and chat – only to have the excitement crushed with the newest “feature”: ads.

I really loved the new Yahoo Mail interface, I’ve been using it since early beta. I’ve never been a big fan of the GMail interface. Yet, the ads have been so annoying I decided to switch.

In the few months I’ve been on GMail Apps, I’ve gotten comfortable with the new interface. At least the ads are text-only and minimal. I never log into my old Yahoo account anymore.

I’ve written twice to ATT/Yahoo customer service complaining about the ads that I’m forced PAY for as part of my service with no response. In spite of all the complaints I’ve seen here and elsewhere, ATT/Yahoo still make public comments that customers have no problem with the changes. Blah.

SHAME ON YOU ATT & YAHOO. It should be easier to provided unlimited storage with so many users no longer using your service.

nnaemeka david | December 6th, 2007 at 10:45 am

it’s great yahoo is giving unlimited storage for its mail service. i’ve been searching for your paid mail service. i want to do reselling, that is buy space and resell to other customers if you do provide various number of mail boxes for a service. is that possible? i think hostgator.com is offering such service, pronounced, unlimited mail. does yahoo do it? i’ll be happy if you do
thanks

Steve | December 10th, 2007 at 7:40 pm

I give up. Yahoo is out of touch. I thought maybe I could get used to the banner ads, their size, having to minimize each page, having to wait forever for the page to load, but now . . . now with a news page I have to click through to get to my mail page . . . that’s it. Jerry, you are out of touch. I take that back. I think you know exactly what you want Yahoo to be. Advertising centric. Go ahead, forget about what made Yahoo cutting edge. Yahoo isn’t an internet infrastructure company at all. Google is going to own you – oh wait, they already do. They understand progress, and customer needs. I invested in Google this year, but I’d never even consider Yahoo given this ad-tastic email debacle. Give it up.

bill | December 11th, 2007 at 9:26 am

Storage to be paid for by constant bombardment of ads on my email page! You’re losing this customer.

William R. Cousert | December 14th, 2007 at 11:59 am

1. Why is it that Yahoo Mail in just about every country EXCEPT the US has free POP3 email access? Why does Yahoo discriminate against Americans? I had to get a UK email address just so I could get POP3 access! What about IMAP? Google offers both of these for FREE!

2. What does “unlimited space” really mean? I’d like to save every photo and attachment I receive FOREVER. This could ultimately add up to hundreds of terabytes, maybe even more. Will usage like this cause my account to be cancelled?

3. Filters. 15 isn’t enough. Why not unlimited filters? I’d like to sort all my incoming mail into folders, even sub folders.

4. Spam – I still get tons of viagra and 419 spam every single day. There has to be a way to filter all of these out.

at&t sucks | December 18th, 2007 at 6:01 am

YAY! Unlimited storage. Well, since I have to deal with all these stupid ads all over my inbox, I think I’m going to start emailing myself every large photo I have, and keep them safely backed up in my yahoo mailbox. if I have to endure ads for unlimited storage, you can bet I’m going to use all the “unlimited” space I can.

Can these ads be removed as Spam? | February 9th, 2008 at 9:10 am

That was what I was online chatting with a yahoo tech about yesterday. She acted like I was the only person to tell her of the half page ads in the inbox. Then she blamed it on my online security and told me I needed to switch to ATT online protection. This message cannot be avoided it is sent in by yahoo themselves and they don’t want us to be able to decide if we want to see them or not

Chinookman | March 12th, 2008 at 7:01 pm

What sucks is that I have been a PAYING CUSTOMER for over 9 years and you reward me with your frigging advertisements! All they do is lock up my browser with a bunch of $hitty boxes that says “Fire Fox failed to load” What a load alright of crap. Keep your ads to the FREE accounts.

Look at your business model it needs to be updated and what a cop out about not receiving many complaints…hell yes that would be my way out too if I was pissing off a lot of customers with spam advertisements….!!!

Way to go……jerks…..

Rob Becker | March 25th, 2008 at 7:07 am

It could be pure coincidence, but I find it interesting that some of the spam I receive (dated a day or more into the future to sit at the top of my inbox) comes from advertisers who happen to have banners cluttering up our mailboxes.

Rob Becker | March 29th, 2008 at 7:07 am

How ethical is it when you plaster my screen with an that says: “2008 #1 Winner. This is not a joke. You are the 10,000 visitor!” At the bottom is a button that says “click here to claim.”

Is this what you’ve reduced yourself to make money? YOu have to run extremely vague ads that prey on people who might actually fall for this crap? This is disgraceful.

nathan | April 18th, 2008 at 7:58 am

Yes, I too, after almost a year of this, am tired of these banner ads. In the e-mail itself, the spam blocker seems to do a good job – except one place: the large piece to the right gets spammed with endless banner adds for things I don’t want.

Scott Davison | May 27th, 2008 at 11:44 pm

As a Bellsouth customer, I was bought by AT&T. Yahoo!’s aggressive advertising has been the downfall of a few of my favorite message boards in ‘01-’02, and I’ll have nothing to do with them, and have run screming from anything Yahoo! related. Now my home page, and e-mail page are flooded with ads, as well as my inbox despite banishing many gigs of the stuff as “Report as spam”.

I guess it’s time to go ISP/Bundle shopping again. Hopefully my next ISP won’t be bought by you anytime soon.

Leaving Soon | July 18th, 2008 at 3:44 pm

Yahoo can’t figure out why Google is beating them up one side and down another? Look at the $&*#() ads all over the mail browser. I could put up with banner ads but these things flash and have dancing monkeys or what ever. It makes your screen look like some cheap carnival. I travel internationally quite a bit and the connections often are not all that great. All these animated ads take longer to load than the messages. The really infuriating part is I’m paying for this service! Forget unlimited storage – just get rid of the ads! Meanwhile I’m checking out alternate DSL providers. I’ll gladly pay twice as much not to have to look at Yahoo’s garbage.

Mike | August 12th, 2008 at 3:31 pm

I am a paying ATT DSL subcriber and I am tired of all the ads in the email page. If something is not done about it fast, I’m going to find another ISP.

Barbara | November 17th, 2008 at 11:33 am

Yahoo is full of hot air when it claims there haven’t been very many complaints from users. There are probably many more complaints that may not have reached them because people might be contacting their internet providers like Verizon, which is what I did. Verizon uses Yahoo as the e-mail provider so since I pay Verizon for my service, I complained to them last week when all this ad stuff started cluttering and squeezing up my mailbox. I also don’t need unlimited space and manage to delete old mail daily unlike some hoarders who save their 800 e-mails due to lack of organizational ability I suppose.

Davy | December 19th, 2008 at 6:39 am

I would like to have Yahoo unlimited storage

ted faluszczak | May 18th, 2009 at 1:01 pm

Hey nice ads about all the girls that get paid while they sleep. Why don’t they find a way to take these off before my kids see them!

Annie Nguyen | June 14th, 2009 at 10:43 am

I DON’T WANT ANY ADs ON MY PAID EMAILs PLEASE. Please my paid email account ALONE….. ATT YAHO O is BADDDDDDDDDDd the ad’s made my computer so slow…..I PAID for my DSL but YAHOO PUT ADs on my sbcglobal.net mailbox ….if I don’t accept the ad I am not able to read my email….if I do, these ad makes my computer so slow….I hate yahoo….I am going to cancel ATT DSL….they shouldn’t have to do with yahoo.

Steve | July 10th, 2009 at 6:03 pm

Terrible email service. Spam over and over again. Obtrusive ads slowing everything down. Many times email will not even load. On and on. Worst email service I have ever seen. Try gmail, gmx or even AOL/AIM. ATT and Yahoo are 5th rate companies.

Dale | September 7th, 2009 at 5:56 pm

I must say that $19.99/ yr for hotmail w/o ads is worth it.