Death! Of! Yahoo!

Ok so its not actually dead yet, its zombified corpse has been lurching on for a decade or more. Don't get me wrong they've done well, they survived the dot com bubble, look at those around when it was young, AOL, Comcast, webcawler. Hell GOPHER was alive and well back them. All gone now, even hotmail. Dead.

The! Purple! People! Palace!

In fact I've hand the same email address longer than pretty much anyone I can think of.The! Million! Dollar! Question! is how long can they survive? 16 years ago I paid them $20 US for POP* mail access, for a year, they forgot to charge me again for many years, before giving the feature away free. Since I use POP mail, and their server DNS names haven't changed in a decade + I've no idea what their homepage looks like. I've certainly never seen any advertiseing.  So lets assume the $20 they got off me in 2000 is the only revenue I've ever generated for them. They must die soon. Yahoo Messenger, dead and gone, yahoo! groups - I'd forgoten about them, my mates who had yahoo emails have all gone to gmail. It Yahoo! gave up on its its own search results a decade or more back.

I'm going to have to face it one day my free POP mail will either cease or be bought up in a firesale by cretins, venture capitalists, asset strippers or B%$^dy Micro B%$^y Soft.

So its time to make like a boy scout, and be prepared to relinquish my @yahoo.com before the crisis comes around. I long ago moved to running my own IMAP server and pulling down yahoo to my own server, but I've also seen how hard it is to manage your own web email reputation these days, so better start using the at oceanhippie.net addresses, wear it in if you like, setup and air the SPF, DKIM records. So if you email me I'll probably reply from my at0ceanhippie dot net address from now on. Don't worry Yahoo still works.

* FYI I would have quite happily paid $20 dollars a year for the last 18, if you'd asked.**
** its too late now BTW.