Yahoo admits mangling e-mail (2002) (opens in new tab)

What totally enraged me about this is that the policy was apparently introduced long after I created my account. At some point when I switched to Gmail, I set up yahoo to forward to it. This worked for years. Then this policy kicked in and from one day to the other, the Yahoo account was deleted. No warning was sent to the Gmail address beforehand. There wasn't much going on on the Yahoo account anyways, so I only noticed it much later. I have an old YouTube account that I signed up to with that yahoo address that I can't access anymore, and not do the recovery process because email.

Easy, just recreate that Yahoo account right? Wrong, to suck even more, yahoo now only offers new Email accounts on their .com domain. Mine wasn't on the .com domain. But existing accounts on the other domains still work fine, so they need to keep up that infra anyways.

>Full disclosure: I work on Yahoo Mail, but I’m not speaking for my employer.

I've worked for large corporations before, and I have had training g that explicitly told me not to "go on social media, disclose my affiliation, and then run text support".

I'm not going to tell you how to post on HN - cause I love hearing true tech stories, but you might consider caution

Gmail definitely does not enact this policy. Me and a friend managed to log into a shared gmail account recently we had from high school, to which no one logged in for more than a decade.

Unrelated question, but since you work on Yahoo Mail...

What's its association with AT&T? My parents have an old AT&T email they want to keep after leaving AT&T. AT&T claims it's possible (which I find shocking), but it's not really clear who actually runs the account. I think it was originally sold as AT&T/Yahoo, so was it Yahoo mail under the hood? Is that still the case?

Heck, I login daily (my Yahoo Mail is my "this online shop needs an email address" address) and a few years ago I checked, it's lost my emails before the year 2000. (Yeah I got the address when Yahoo started offering them, because I thought it'd be cool to have an @yahoo.com address...). Of course back then I actually had real emails, from high school friends and family members, which are all gone now. Great job your team is doing!

Just this afternoon I was with my father looking for a way to backup all of his emails on his yahoo account.

I was looking "naïvely" for the button to request all of his personal data. I didn't find one and there's probably one somewhere I'm guessing.

I resigned myself to set up Outlook on his computer and make a manual backup.

Huh, this would explain why some of my gmail redirects have seemingly died.

How are they giving it away for free?

Same here, glad I'm not alone in this. When I explain to people I can search 25 years of personal email via my current inbox, they just look at me like I'm making it up.

When I switched to a personal Exchange server about 15 years ago, I copied over all previous emails from a collection of legacy accounts, and then more recently I migrated the whole lot up to Exchange Online.

I also converted and migrated in old mail messages from a DEC VMS system I used to be a SysAdmin on.

I just have all my emails since 1997 in my current email account. Every time I've changed providers, I've copied the old emails over to the new one as they've all had some POP3 functionality for import.

I do still have my first email account from 1997 too, but it was an early free email service that got acquired by Yahoo so I was hit by this same Yahoo deletion policy at some point. Which didn't really matter as I had everything copied over to the next one anyway.

Same but my archive goes back to 1988, including some I carried over from Fidonet.

...he says while fully knowing that the majority of humans store important information in free email services.

The genius is exactly that they haven't bothered. Can you imagine the flow of layout bugs over the past 20 years, or the managers calling to scrap old content because it's generating so much workload?

That's very much a successful case of avoiding needless technology

CNN still has its very first pages from 1995 http://www.cnn.com/EVENTS/timeline/

Its site design in the early 2000s was much like the BBC's http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/08/11/email.hoaxes/in...

Past headlines remain relentlessly interesting... https://web.archive.org/web/20000815060311/http://www.cnn.co...

I guess it's still running on the original server... the page took about 30 seconds to load for me!

We ask people not to submit archive links* because it's important for readers to see the original provenance of the article, e.g. in the site name displayed to the right of the title.

"Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* If the original article is really not available anywhere else on the web and is interesting enough for a good HN thread, posting archive.org is ok.

I think Wikipedia references are encouraged to use archive links because it will show the page at the time that they used it as a reference as opposed to linking to the live page which can change at any time.

And yet, during my annual login to the Yahoo account I keep around out of morbid curiosity, it’s full of spam. It seems like refusing to accept inbound mail would be an improvement in their filtering.

Full disclosure: I work on Yahoo Mail, but I’m not speaking for my employer.

Have you checked out CFL? If users mark sender’s messages as spam, it can impact that sender’s deliverability. The CFL can help avoid these recipients by understanding spam reports.

More best practices for deliverability: https://senders.yahooinc.com/best-practices/

AOL and Yahoo mail have very similar backends given they are owned by same company.

Same here, most of mine are just delayed though.

Sounds like greylisting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting_(email)

Yes. ISO-8601 all the things

If you regularly encounter humans that use different date formats, IMO that method is a great way to avoid confusion between dd/mm/yy and mm/dd/yy.

ISO-8601 is great for computers since it has nice sorting properties, but IMO it's less great for human to human communication. For example if you're trying to set an appointment (or reading current news), it wastes a lot of time to specify the year for every message or article when it's already clear from context.

I think you mean, “if you viewed this on a screen 13+ inches” because nearly all displays now are way more than 800x600 resolution.

When I worked at starbucks I loved that shit! 2 shots of blonde espresso, a pump of caramel and a liiittle bit of steamed half+half. Thinking about it now makes me feel sick though.

are you aware that it's undrinkable? ;-)

"evreviewal" probably not

You don't even need letters to achieve turing completeness in js: http://www.jsfuck.com/

Just use 'this'.

Scunthorpe approved!

Easy there. HN doesn't like harsh language.

*Clbuttic comment

"It was as if a light had been Nookd…" (https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3994)

The localhost forward proxy I run changes http:// to https://. Unlike a browser extension such as "HTTPS Everywhere" it is not restricted only to web browsers.

The page is available via https:// through Internet Archive (IA):

https://web.archive.org/web/20030408070754if_/http://news.bb...

If I encounter a site like this that has http:// only URLs, I can specify the proxy configuration to redirect to IA when it encounters an http:// URl with the domain "news.bbc.co.uk".

The answer to the "real question" is that there is no https:// URL to provide. As I stated, changing this URL to https:// will only return "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" with the Location header containing the http:// URL.

You answered the actual question asked (my emphasis added below):

> Dumb user question: Why is this URL redirecting to https:// from http://

It appears the intent of the question was the inverse—the link redirects from HTTPS to HTTP (the mechanics of which have already been addressed by another comment). I don’t think you should have been downvoted for answering the question as stated in good faith, even if it wasn’t the intent of the question.

With that said, the question to me is why does the BBC downgrade HTTPS requests for older content to HTTP permalinks? It seems to me that’s probably more complex than just serving the same content for both protocols. Perhaps it’s policy, or regulatory?

I had the same problem and eventually settled on "medical evaluation" as a mnemonic.

A mnemonic that suits more cases is, "i before e, except after c."