Any of you still use a yahoo mail?

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I'm still using one and this forums account was registered with that email.
 
Yes. All of my online accounts where I post things are “burner” accounts where I remain anonymous. If they go away, no loss. Granted I would not like to lose this account because I have been here a while.
 
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I'm surprised yahoo is still around, I thought they died when altavista went the way of the dodo? Even hotmail. I thought that would've been replaced with outlook.com. Perhaps I need to hang around less on the dark web... :)
I do know gmail still exists, I have one of their spy accounts.
 
I guess while to most people hotmail is dead and forgotten the sheer amount of users they had back in the day means there is still more than a handful of those accounts in active use and the owners would have been pretty annoyed if MS suddenly told them that their address would now end in @outlook.com. I figure most of those people would just sign up for gmail as it makes no difference in regards to having to update their email on all the accounts they registered with it.
 
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I even still have my original @rocketmail account. It was bought by yahoo and works OK (via smtp/imap). Can't stand the yahoo web mail software. It does tend to get rejected by a number of other email providers however. Perhaps due to the legacy of hordes of rocketmail users back in the day XD
 
If you want to know a business has a future or not, check whether yahoo bought it or not. (360, Flickr, Tumblr, etc)
 
No, but I had an e-mail account @ another so-called free e-mail provider. Posteo.de & Mailbox.org are ad-free, secure, privacy-enhanced & anonymous alternatives, at the cost of 1€/month. Both offer a large count of other domain endings, so your're not restricted to a .de or .org address. Probably there are other similar services, these are the two I found when I was researching this topic.
 
mjollnir said:
Probably there are other similar services, these are the two I found when I was researching this topic.
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Email providers are a complicated topic. I'd say as far as the big ones (gmail, outlook, gmx, ...) are concerned you pretty much know you will be the product at least to some extend but when comparing the privacy aware ones it's a tough choice. They all make more or less the same claims but for the most part it's impossible to judge which ones are actually going to honor their words. I think in the end it comes down to gut feeling and personal preference as one can never really know for sure what they are doing behind the scenes anyways.
 
ekvz said:
Email providers are a complicated topic. I'd say as far as the big ones (gmail, outlook, gmx, ...) are concerned you pretty much know you will be the product at least to some extend but when comparing the privacy aware ones it's a tough choice. They all make more or less the same claims but for the most part it's impossible to judge which ones are actually going to honor their words. I think in the end it comes down to gut feeling and personal preference as one can never really know for sure what they are doing behind the scenes anyways.
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I can encrypt my e-mails & cloud storage with my own encryption keys. Then it tracks down to a statement of a NSA staff member: if we want, we can decrypt anything with a brute-force attack, because we can access enough computing resources to do so. Not in general, but to spy on selected people. (quoted by analogy).
 
mjollnir said:
I can encrypt my e-mails & cloud storage with my own encryption keys. Then it tracks down to a statement of a NSA staff member: if we want, we can decrypt anything with a brute-force attack, because we can access enough computing resources to do so. Not in general, but to spy on selected people. (quoted by analogy).
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Agreed. Absolute privacy (especially when it comes to email and secret services) is not possible. With a lot of email sources it isn't even an option to have them sent encrypted so they can be sniffed in transit and even if they are there still is the meta data. Aside from the fact that, as you said, the big players could just throw resources at the problem if they wanted to. If email providers collect data it's likely for less "official" reasons (targeted marketing or maybe - if they are really evil - spying on company secrets some untrained employee attached to an email) but i am still suspicious if some supposed pro privacy providers aren't using their claims as a ploy for not only attracting people with interesting data but also having a higher chance of them giving up traceable payment information thereby paying to increase the value of the profile being generated.
 
My e-mail (+ cloud storage) provider accepts cash, so I can pay anonymously if I want that, e.g. via snail-mail or a courier. And they claim to have no connection in their systems between payment metadata & customer accounts, so if that's true I can pay via PayPal or electronic remittance from my bank account. They simply have no customer database with name & adress & such.
 
mjollnir said:
My e-mail (+ cloud storage) provider accepts cash, so I can pay anonymously if I want that, e.g. via snail-mail or a courier. And they claim to have no connection in their systems between payment metadata & customer accounts, so if that's true I can pay via PayPal or electronic remittance from my bank account. They simply have no customer database with name & adress & such.
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That should be fine as long as noone feels the need to sent an unencrypted email and thinks it's a good idea to address the other party by full name. No, seriously, that's probably as good as it gets. It's not like i'd want to be fully anonymous to my providers anyways. I actually like to be able to authorize myself in case i lose my password or something along those lines (didn't happen yet but never say never...) and lets face it, i am a boring person. I don't think anyone really wants my data all that much.
 
To authorize myself if I forget my password, they do what's very common in such cases: I have to answser a question where only me can know the correct answer. Maybe my sister can answer correctly, in case I die tomorrow in a traffic accident. It's commonly known that various groups do want our metadata, they're collecting it extensively, and they're doing things (derive knowledge) with big data that are sometimes frightening. "They" keep this knowledge closed, while it's our data. Thus I do not agree to your argument that you're a boring person. The point of interest here is that knowledge derived from analyzing the metadata of millions of boring people can be very interesting & powerful.
 
mjollnir said:
To authorize myself if I forget my password, they do what's very common in such cases: I have to answser a question where only me can know the correct answer. Maybe my sister can answer correctly, in case I die tomorrow in a traffic accident.
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If you have a good question that's probably quite nice. I've sadly never been able to come up with anything practical but at least i try to keep track of what i put in those fields now and not just put random garbage there. This has even lead to a couple funny situations. Like when a company insisted on using the question to authorize me over the phone just to find out that my "place of marriage" (one of their recommendations... i don't want to know how many people put the actual answer there) was a 30 characters long string containing just about everything possible short of hieroglyphs. Disappointingly they didn't let me finish and just kept repeating that they believed it was me.

mjollnir said:
It's commonly known that various groups do want our metadata, they're collecting it extensively, and they're doing things (derive knowledge) with big data that are sometimes frightening. "They" keep this knowledge closed, while it's our data. Thus I do not agree to your argument that you're a boring person. The point of interest here is that knowledge derived from analyzing the metadata of millions of boring people can be very interesting & powerful.
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Of course. I didn't want to make it sound like i don't care because of "having nothing to hide". I actually care for my privacy quite a lot. It's just that i don't see much reason to try all that hard when i fully know i can't protect it completely anyways. There probably is a bit of resignation too after following the topic for years and years. All in all it's very sad but that still doesn't mean i will just hand my data over. Even it is futile in the end i will at least have wasted some resources of whoever is watching.

I also feel the best way of protecting data is still just not producing it in the first place. These days people put so much personal information online. Sadly i think not participating might become a social problem sooner or later. Sometimes it even already seems like if you don't have a presence in at least 5 social networks you might as well not exist.

kpedersen said:
+1 for this. This burner service is really handy for maintaining Microsoft email accounts that require you to verify your account using another email. Absolutely bizarre.
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Wow, Mailinator isn't being blocked? That's interesting. There seems to be some very extensive blocklist of those throwaway services and i would have thought MS to be among the first to use such a thing but maybe mailinator is just rotating their domains fast enough to evade it.
 
ekvz said:
Of course. I didn't want to make it sound like i don't care because of "having nothing to hide". I actually care for my privacy quite a lot.
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I am also in the same boat. I even think I try harder for my privacy due to their sheer arrogance. This culture I feel needs attacking.

ekvz said:
Wow, Mailinator isn't being blocked? That's interesting. There seems to be some very extensive blocklist of those throwaway services
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It wasn't before but that isn't to say Microsoft hasn't blocked it now or in the future. I guess you just have to quickly find something new before they do block it in future.

One thing is for sure... criminals like Microsoft really want to link as many online account personas together as possible :/
 
kpedersen said:
I am also in the same boat. I even think I try harder for my privacy due to their sheer arrogance. This culture I feel needs attacking.
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Yes, in a strange way it's somewhat satisfying. I used to have a setup that layerd 3 VPNs on top of each other. Now technically that's not exactly elegant but the thought of someone decrypting all of this just to find that i am looking at man pages and browse crusty github repos amuses me.

kpedersen said:
It wasn't before but that isn't to say Microsoft hasn't blocked it now or in the future. I guess you just have to quickly find something new before they do block it in future.

One thing is for sure... criminals like Microsoft really want to link as many online account personas together as possible :/
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These days one has to be thankful if companies don't instantly request a phone number just to get something as simple as a free email address. It's madness and finding one of those free sms receiving numbers that isn't already burned to death is a huge waste of time.

Concerning the throwaway emails: There is tons and tons of them but in my experience the blocklists are sadly very, very good. Once those are used finding a non blocked domain becomes a pain. My go to solution is yandex. They still allow mail accounts to be registered without phone or fallback email. Lately they have become quite trigger happy when it comes to detecting "suspicious traffic" (i.e. me reading my emails...) and requesting phone numbers though so treat with caution.
 
I lost my forums account so I created a new one. But to the Mods: please do not merge the post of my previous account to this one, I want a fresh restart. Thanks.

The story is. I stored my passwords in plain text and put these text files inside an encrypted 7z archive and upload it to my Google Drive. Doing this way I could have my passwords everywhere I go, just sign in to GDrive and download the archive and done. But today it's stopped working. I lost my Google account because of some awkward reasons. I used fake information when registered it and it's not linked to my android phone (I have another Google account for that phone, with my real information), so it's no way for me to get my Google account back. Having the password of the lost Google account is not enough for them to recover my account. So I lost not only my fake Google account and all of the passwords inside the 7z archive.

The phone number I used to register the Yahoo email is also no longer mine. I used once time SIM card. So I can't use the Yahoo email to recover accounts I registered using it. All of the passwords of mine are strong passwords automatically generated by Firefox. I don't even remember a single a them and I always deleted all of the saved passwords from Firefox.

Long story short, I think I'm clever but finally I lost everything. I found I'm stupid.
 
Only curious, do you know if Google could know the content of an encrypted 7z archive uploaded to GDrive? When I created the archive, I chose to encrypt the file list, too.
 
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