why the big ISPs want to choose Yahoo as their email provider?

jeffpan · 9 Sep 2015, 04:56 PM

AFAIK, the ISPs below are with big scale, why they want to choose Yahoo as their email provider, rather than developing their own mail service? What advantages does yahoo have for those ISPs? Thx.

ATT
verizon
frontiernet
BT

janusz · 9 Sep 2015, 05:59 PM

BT has already chosen Yahoo as the email provider

kijinbear · 9 Sep 2015, 08:02 PM

It's a big hassle to build and maintain a reliable email service for tens of millions of users. I have yet to see a single major ISP that does it right. It's probably cheaper and easier for them to outsource the whole thing to Yahoo.

Yahoo, on the other hand, is desperately in need of users. By partnering with major ISPs, they can get hundreds of millions of users. Most of these people probably won't use their Yahoo accounts at all, but even if a small fraction do, that's millions of users.

As for users, they probably get a much better experience by using Yahoo, too. So the arrangement seems to be in everyone's interest.

zimmermanfan · 12 Sep 2015, 04:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kijinbear

So the arrangement seems to be in everyone's interest.

It's in everyones interest if Yahoo is not utilized.

* Yahoo is a CISPA-supporter (anti-consumer privacy)
* Yahoo voluntarily disclosed the identity of a pro-democracy forum organizer to the Chinese government without warrant, leading to his incarceration.
* Yahoo has the highest contempt for EFF principles. They use DNSBLs at the TCP layer (that is, they crudely block legitimate e-mail as spam, and do so in a way that recipients have no way knowing that it happened [iow, no quarantine])
* Yahoo's IM accounts cannot talk to non-Yahoo IM users (proprietary protocol). And Yahoo changes the protocol frequently to hinder non-Yahoo-produced IM clients from connecting.
* Yahoo's servers are located in a region that has the poorest standards of privacy.

jeffpan · 12 Sep 2015, 11:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zimmermanfan

It's in everyones interest if Yahoo is not utilized.

* Yahoo is a CISPA-supporter (anti-consumer privacy)
* Yahoo voluntarily disclosed the identity of a pro-democracy forum organizer to the Chinese government without warrant, leading to his incarceration.
* Yahoo has the highest contempt for EFF principles. They use DNSBLs at the TCP layer (that is, they crudely block legitimate e-mail as spam, and do so in a way that recipients have no way knowing that it happened [iow, no quarantine])
* Yahoo's IM accounts cannot talk to non-Yahoo IM users (proprietary protocol). And Yahoo changes the protocol frequently to hinder non-Yahoo-produced IM clients from connecting.
* Yahoo's servers are located in a region that has the poorest standards of privacy.

Good points. I don't like Yahoo.

George_B · 12 Sep 2015, 07:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeffpan

AFAIK, the ISPs below are with big scale, why they want to choose Yahoo as their email provider, rather than developing their own mail service? What advantages does yahoo have for those ISPs? Thx.

ATT
verizon
frontiernet
BT

It's extremely hard for a company lacking specialized knowledge to develop mail infrastructure that can handle and scale up from hundreds of thousands of users to millions of users. Yahoo does have such infrastructure already and knowledge so it's quite easy for them. Also keep in mind that Google used to offer such a service 'Google for ISP's' but they discontinued it in their free version just this summer.

kijinbear · 12 Sep 2015, 08:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zimmermanfan

It's in everyones interest if Yahoo is not utilized.

* Yahoo is a CISPA-supporter (anti-consumer privacy)
* Yahoo voluntarily disclosed the identity of a pro-democracy forum organizer to the Chinese government without warrant, leading to his incarceration.
* Yahoo has the highest contempt for EFF principles. They use DNSBLs at the TCP layer (that is, they crudely block legitimate e-mail as spam, and do so in a way that recipients have no way knowing that it happened [iow, no quarantine])
* Yahoo's IM accounts cannot talk to non-Yahoo IM users (proprietary protocol). And Yahoo changes the protocol frequently to hinder non-Yahoo-produced IM clients from connecting.
* Yahoo's servers are located in a region that has the poorest standards of privacy.

Replace all instances of "Yahoo" with any of the ISPs mentioned by OP, and chances are the situation will be exactly the same.

So, correction: It's in everyone's interest not to utilize their ISP's email service at all, regardless of who is actually running the servers. Especially if we're going to talk about American and British ISPs.

Tsunami · 13 Sep 2015, 01:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zimmermanfan

It's in everyones interest if Yahoo is not utilized.

* Yahoo is a CISPA-supporter (anti-consumer privacy)
* Yahoo voluntarily disclosed the identity of a pro-democracy forum organizer to the Chinese government without warrant, leading to his incarceration.
* Yahoo has the highest contempt for EFF principles. They use DNSBLs at the TCP layer (that is, they crudely block legitimate e-mail as spam, and do so in a way that recipients have no way knowing that it happened [iow, no quarantine])
* Yahoo's IM accounts cannot talk to non-Yahoo IM users (proprietary protocol). And Yahoo changes the protocol frequently to hinder non-Yahoo-produced IM clients from connecting.
* Yahoo's servers are located in a region that has the poorest standards of privacy.

Would you distrust other Yahoo services equally much, such as Flickr?

See as well here

Cory · 13 Sep 2015, 02:03 AM

Verizon has switched to a propriety in house solution for all new customers.

9 Sep 2015, 04:56 PM	#1
jeffpan The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Sep 2005 Location: Macao Posts: 2,161 Representative of: tls-mail.com	why the big ISPs want to choose Yahoo as their email provider? AFAIK, the ISPs below are with big scale, why they want to choose Yahoo as their email provider, rather than developing their own mail service? What advantages does yahoo have for those ISPs? Thx. ATT verizon frontiernet BT

9 Sep 2015, 05:59 PM	#2
janusz The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Feb 2006 Location: EU Posts: 4,945	BT has already chosen Yahoo as the email provider

9 Sep 2015, 08:02 PM	#3
kijinbear Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Mar 2011 Location: ~$ Posts: 652	It's a big hassle to build and maintain a reliable email service for tens of millions of users. I have yet to see a single major ISP that does it right. It's probably cheaper and easier for them to outsource the whole thing to Yahoo. Yahoo, on the other hand, is desperately in need of users. By partnering with major ISPs, they can get hundreds of millions of users. Most of these people probably won't use their Yahoo accounts at all, but even if a small fraction do, that's millions of users. As for users, they probably get a much better experience by using Yahoo, too. So the arrangement seems to be in everyone's interest.

13 Sep 2015, 02:03 AM	#9
Cory Essential Contributor Join Date: May 2012 Posts: 459	Verizon has switched to a propriety in house solution for all new customers.