Yahoo classic mail & e-mail security

[Doug_FL]

How can I switch back to Yahoo classic mail, when using the latest version of Google Chrome or IE 9. Classic works better for me.
Also, I hear rumblings that Yahoo mail is not as secure as other e-mail services, such as Live. Any truth to all that? Yahoo is free, but even
if I were to pay their yearly fee, that does not mean the account would be more secure.

Yahoo has its problems that is for sure. Yahoo Groups does too. I also saw a story that thousands of Yahoo
e-mail accounts had been hacked into. They were the accounts with simple passwords, that should be avoided.

Abcdef for example.

So, this didn't effect me. Any ideas, besides common sense about passwords, to keep a Yahoo mail account secure? I never
put full account numbers on e-mail. All the financial services companies I do business with, have a message system. The e-mails
I do get from them, are just confirms, that I paid a bill, or made a depo etc. I feel I'm pretty careful. But, I'm open to any suggestions
to increase security. I don't see how that can hurt. An extra amount of security, may well mean, the hackers go after someone else
and not little old me. 

 

[jcarpy]

Yahoo used to let you switch back and forth between the current version and classic mail, but I noticed that is no longer available.  You will get used to it, and now I don't remember what was different other than a little layout look.

I have used Yahoo mail since at least 2002 and never had a security problem, and I don't see any value in paying for email. Probably the biggest risk to security after the password, is opening enclosures on unsolicited emails, which will sometimes contain a key logger or other malware.

 

[tnthub]

Depends on how you define secure...  Essentially once any communication leaves a closed system it is in some manner "not secure".  I have a Yahoo account for spam stuff, a MS live account to meet Microsoft specific requirements in regards to working with various Microsoft channel programs, but I maintain my own exchange server in my office and have VPN connections established and encryption enabled between certain sites for security purposes.

I do not use any "free" accounts for anything that might be considered sensitive.  Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and other free services generally do a pretty decent job for most people and are "reasonably secure" in that the instances of outages are fairly low and their staff keeps current with traditional IT safeguards.  That said, the concept of a free service shutting down would be a major inconvenience if I were to rely on a free email address for business.

If you buy a domain name it will almost always come with "free" email accounts that you can manage yourself.  In my opinion, the ten bucks or so per year to have your own email, separate from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, or an ISP is a reasonable investment.

 

[Ned]

I don't believe the classic Yahoo email is available any longer.  The new version seems cleaner and faster to me.

Microsoft Live.com email is being replaced with outlook.com, but the old email domain will still work.  If you have a live.com email account you should probably go to outlook.com and grab your same user name(s) at the outlook.com domain.

The best advice above is to get your own domain and use that for all your important email.  For example, we own the nedreiter.com domain and use that for our primary email addresses.  We also have accounts at Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook.com, and several others, but mostly to lock up the same user name at all those domains and for email lists and Yahoo groups, etc.