| Some time back I was going to subscribe to the Yahoo R-75
groop. When I
| saw how much information they wanted, I bailed out.
|
| Michael

Yes. I found that to be true. It may be that people already in
their system were grandfathered in without a problem. It's the
new folks that get nabbed. When Geocities/Yahoo Groups was easier
to access in the past, I found their particular form of popups to
be ingeniiously eggregious. Now, you can't even take a look
without agreeing to be abused.

I've tried to sign up lately, omitting certain sensitive
information. The information that they wanted was both invasive
(date of birth, etc.) and a spam setup. The system won't pass the
application unless those sensitive fields are filled -- I made up
false entries for them. I also gave a competing webmail address
so the spam would go there. No matter what, their system
repeatedly refused to register me, returning a bogus message
every time (I reserve a special place in hell for bogus error
messages and the bogus bogusers who write them). I believe it's
because it recognized myrealbox.com as another free webmail
service, and won't play without a true wide-open juicy spam
socket (a bona-fide ISP address). The same thing happened to my
son. Yahoo's terms of service and privacy policy make the price
pretty clear, too; you gotta pay to play.

I don't feel that it's worth compromising my privacy and sanity
to make use of any service that they provide. Too bad. Perhaps we
need an ethical alternative to these jokers in return for a small
fee. Someone's got to pay, after all.

Richard