cellphones bring back text web mail

[davidnix71]

I can't reach Yahoo email at work anymore without the risk of them trying to install parasitic software (their "toolbar").

That would get me fired. I never have this trouble at home because I use a mac. We use corporate Dells with XP at work and only IE.

I figured Yahoo must be looking at my User Agent string at login to determine how to spam me, so from home on OSX Tiger and FF3.5.2 I changed my UA string to IE (6,7,8) and sure enough they tried to get me to install incompatible software.

One of the oher stock UA strings is iPhone 3. Presenting that UA string got me a simple text email page, almost like what I would see using Lynx. When I told Yahoo I was their Slurp web crawler, they just gave me my regular email page without all the spam.

Bottom line is that if you use Windoze, they view you as a sucker.

As an aside, someone on a Yahoo group emailed me today saying MS was cutting off all Hotmail support for Outlook, OE and Entourage as of Sept.1  All those users will have to switch to webmail. I don't know if they'll allow TBird users to import after Monday or not.

[worker201]

Bottom line is that if you use Windoze, they view you as a sucker.

It sounds better if you say "potential customer" instead of "sucker".

As an aside, someone on a Yahoo group emailed me today saying MS was cutting off all Hotmail support for Outlook, OE and Entourage as of Sept.1  All those users will have to switch to webmail. I don't know if they'll allow TBird users to import after Monday or not.

As far as I can tell, Outlook Express is the only product affected by this change.  It used a deprecated protocol, which Microsoft isn't going to support anymore.  Full Outlook doesn't use the protocol, so it isn't affected.  This was supposed to happen June 30th, 2008, but too many people complained, so Outlook Express support got continued until Sept 1st, 2009.