Darkoshi

Yahoo storage limit change; Nonnemacher etymology

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 01:16:04 GMT

Yahoo sent an email to users on June 25, stating "Starting soon, free Yahoo Mail accounts will include an industry-leading 20GB of storage".

It sounds like they are increasing the storage limit, yahoo! But upon reading the email again, I wondered about this part: "If your mailbox exceeds the new storage limit after it goes into effect..."

The storage limit is actually being greatly reduced:
Yahoo Mail Storage Shrinks from 1 TB to 20 GB: What You Need to Know - article by Zach Nonnemacher, Content Manager at ZeroBounce, August 5, 2025.

It doesn't affect me as I don't keep many old emails on the server. But other people probably interpreted it the same way I did at first. I understand Yahoo wanting to put a positive spin on it, but it is counter-productive if Yahoo wants users to check their usage and do something about it.
This page mentions a deadline, which the emails I received did not: Yahoo Mail Users Must Clear Space or Upgrade by August 27 to Avoid Losing Access

So users who are over the new storage limit likely got another email with clearer details.

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I was curious about the etymology of that surname, "Nonnemacher".

According to one page which I won't even link to as it seems to be AI-generated make-believe,
The surname Nonnemacher is of German origin and is derived from the Middle High German word "nonne" meaning "nun" and "macher" meaning "maker" or "craftsman." Therefore, the surname Nonnemacher can be interpreted as "nun maker" or "maker of nuns." It is likely that the name originally referred to someone who made or repaired religious garments or objects used by nuns, or it could have been a nickname for someone associated with a convent or religious community.

The Ancestry.com explanation is rather different:

German: occupational name for a gelder of hogs from Middle High German nunne nonne ‘nun’ and by transfer ‘castrated hog’.
+ an agent derivative of machen ‘to make’.
Source: Dictionary of American Family Names 2nd edition, 2022

What methods and tools do you use to castrate a pig?
Castrating Pigs
No use of anesthesia is mentioned on the above two pages; the below mention it, but it doesn't sound widely used in the U.S.
Castration of Pigs
Piglet castration

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"Eunuch maker" seems a more logical term for a gelder than "Nun maker". So I wondered if the etymologies of "nun" and "eunuch" were related. But according to those links, they aren't.

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Yahoo Answers shutting down

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 16:41:00 GMT

Yahoo Answers to shut down May 4, 2021

First Yahoo Groups, now Yahoo Answers. Sounds like it won't even be left available in read-only mode, as that's what it is saying it is set to now already.

Most of the time, the answers I found posted in Yahoo Answers weren't very good. But every once in a while I'd find something there which I didn't find anywhere else.
Oh, well.

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Paper books whose content can't be searched by a simple typed query.
It occurred to me again recently how outdated that feels to me now.
Each book its own private trove of information, only accessible to those who make the effort required to explore it. Each person having to make their own map, their own index and bookmarks, of what is where inside the book, if they want to find the way back to a particular place in it.

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privacy policy - Google vs Yahoo/OATH

Mon, 30 Apr 2018 05:00:30 GMT

Yahoo Mail (aka OATH) has a new Terms of Service and Privacy Policy starting May 25. The parts of the privacy policy which pertain to how Yahoo may access the information contained in emails disturbs me.

This page appears to have Yahoo's legacy privacy policy, dated June 2017. Based on what that page says, some or all of the policies listed below may not be new, but I'm not sure.

I was wondering if Yahoo's policies are really much different from Google's TOS and Privacy Policy. So I checked.

Google:
Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.

Yahoo/OATH:
OATH Privacy Center, main
Oath analyzes and stores all communications content, including email content from incoming and outgoing mail. This allows us to deliver, personalize and develop relevant features, content, advertising and Services.

OATH FAQ for Communications Products
Oath’s automated systems may analyze all content (such as Mail and Messenger content including instant messages and SMS messages) to detect, among other things, certain words and phrases (we call them "keywords") within these communications. This analysis may occur on all content as it is sent, received, and when it is stored, including communications content from Services synced with your account.

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Our automated systems may analyze all communications content (such as Mail and Messenger content including instant messages and SMS messages) and all photos and other content uploaded to your account

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For example, after automatically removing any information that on its own could reasonably identify the recipient, we may manually review certain commercial communications to develop tools to assist the automated scanning process, improve segmentation and other automated functions and create generic templates of such documents (e.g., using common language to identify the elements of an airline receipt). Oath employees may review the templates to improve our services and our personalization of your experience.

The automated analysis and storage of all content can include information within or about the content you provide, such as photos, attachments and other communications. We may collect information about the photos and videos uploaded, including EXIF data. Exchangeable Image File Format (“EXIF”) data is a record of the settings and other relevant metadata inserted by a camera or device when you take a photo or video, such as camera or device type, aperture, shutter speed, focal length, and location , among other information.

We also may use image recognition algorithms for the purposes bulleted above. For example, the algorithms might identify and tag scenes, color, best crop coordinates, text, actions, objects, or public figures.

It also disturbs me to read how much information Yahoo may be collecting about me from multiple sources:

OATH Privacy Center, main
We collect information from your devices (computers, mobile phones, tablets, etc.), including information about how you interact with our Services and those of our third-party partners and information that allows us to recognize and associate your activity across devices and Services. This information includes device specific identifiers and information such as IP address, cookie information, mobile device and advertising identifiers, browser version, operating system type and version, mobile network information, device settings, and software data. We may recognize your devices to provide you with personalized experiences and advertising across the devices you use.

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This information also includes the kind of content or ads served, viewed or clicked on; the frequency and duration of your activities; the sites or apps you used before accessing our Services and where you went next; whether you engaged with specific content or ads; and whether you went on to visit an advertiser's website, downloaded an advertiser’s app, purchased a product or service advertised, or took other actions.
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Information from Others. We collect information about you when we receive it from other users, third-parties, and affiliates, such as:

When you connect your account to third-party services or sign in using a third-party partner (like Facebook or Twitter).
From publicly-available sources.
From advertisers about your experiences or interactions with their offerings.
When we obtain information from third-parties or other companies, such as those that use our Services. This may include your activity on other sites and apps as well as information those third-parties provide to you or us.
We may also receive information from Verizon and will honor the choices Verizon customers have made about the uses of this information when we receive and use this data.

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We also may use the information we have about you for the following purposes:
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Associate your activity across our Services and your different devices as well as associate any accounts you may use across Oath Services together. We may associate activity and accounts under a single user ID.

Automated scanning emails for certain keywords is something I was aware that Google has been doing for quite a while. But the idea of mail providers scanning email image attachments, and applying facial recognition to see who is in the images, etc., is new to me*. I know that Facebook does that for images uploaded to its site, but I didn't know that email providers would do it too, for images attached to emails. And I hadn't thought much about how much info so many different companies may be sharing with each other to get a "big picture" about a person's activities, as opposed to each company just maintaining its own small set of data for its own analysis, of what people do on their particular website.

*Updated, 2018/05/20: OATH's pages only specifically mention "image recognition", which must mean to see what is in the photos. So they may or may not use "facial recognition" to see who is in photos. But based on the above, the image recognition may recognize "public figures", so it probably does include facial recognition too.

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Yahoo weirdness

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 04:02:23 GMT

Forestfen had difficulty logging into her Yahoo Mail account today. She was being prompted to perform an extra sign-in verification step (aka 2-factor authentication). It wasn't simply a prompt advising her to set up 2-factor authentication as I sometimes get; it was actually prompting her to enter a phone number for the security code to be sent to. There was no way of bypassing it.

To Forestfen's knowledge, she hadn't previously turned on 2-factor authentication, nor had she previously entered her phone number on any Yahoo Options page.

This was corroborated by the fact that the extra sign-in verification window had an entry field for her to enter her phone number in. That was the really odd thing about it (though that didn't occur to me until later). Anyone could have entered any phone number, and have been sent a code for logging in.

I tried logging into her email account from a completely different computer, and got the same prompt as she was getting. This at least assured me that the problem wasn't due to malware on her computer.

The prompt had 2 fields, a "Country" drop-down and a "Phone Number" entry field. There were 2 push-buttons - one to receive a phone call, and the other to receive a SMS message. Forestfen first tried the phone call option (she said she got an automated call with a 3-digit number), and then the SMS option (which sent a 5-digit number), and finally got logged in.

The Yahoo Account info page shows "second sign-in verification" is flagged as being in "beta".
I suppose this must be some bug in their logic.

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Yahoo mail through IMAP

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 04:18:52 GMT

Well. I noticed that I wasn't using the best security settings for Thunderbird, so I updated them and tested them out to make sure the email still worked.

Then I tried setting up Thunderbird to access my Yahoo email account via IMAP, and it worked! I don't know why I thought that it would only work with the paid version of Yahoo Mail. Apparently it's the POP3 access for which you're supposed to need Yahoo Mail Plus.

That means that I can set up Thunderbird on Forestfen's computer for her email, and maybe that will avoid some of the browser issues she's been having.

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2011/08/13 Edited to add:
After setting up my Yahoo mail account in Thunderbird, receiving emails worked ok. But sending emails didn't - there were no error messages, but the emails did not arrive at their destination.

In the Outgoing Server (SMTP) settings, I had the User Name set to my Yahoo ID, without the "[Bad username or site: yahoo @ com]" part. Then I changed it to include the [Bad username or site: yahoo @ com] part, and sending emails started to work.

Possible security issue:
The Thunderbird Error Console (Tools - Error Console) shows these messages:
"smtp.mail.yahoo.com: server does not support RFC 5746, see CVE-2009-3555"
"imap.mail.yahoo.com: server does not support RFC 5746, see CVE-2009-3555"

I wasn't able to find much info on those errors. Apparently it is due to something on Yahoo's side not being set up correctly.
Considering this, it might be better security-wise to access one's Yahoo email via their website rather than via Thunderbird.

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These are the Thunderbird settings that worked for me, to be able to access my free Yahoo email account via IMAP:

Account Settings:
Server Type: IMAP Mail Server
Server Name: imap.mail.yahoo.com
Port: 993 (default)
Connection Security: SSL/TLS
Authentication Method: Normal Password
User Name: yahoo_user_id (with or without [Bad username or site: yahoo @ com] - it seems to work both ways)

Outgoing Server (SMTP) Settings:
Server name: smtp.mail.yahoo.com
Port: 465
Connection Security: SSL/TLS
Authentication Method: Normal Password
User Name: yahoo_user_id@yahoo.com ([Bad username or site: yahoo @ com] seems to be required here, otherwise emails don't get sent right)

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Yahoo's new email interface

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 04:47:06 GMT

Forestfen is having difficulties with Yahoo's new web-mail interface. Its "Clean, simple design that makes email a breeze" is different from how it was before, and therefore is not simple for her. I'm sure there are many other similarly disgruntled non-tech-savvy users like her.

Last week somehow all her Inbox messages got moved to the Trash folder, and I had to show her how to restore them. It might have happened due to the "Select All" checkbox and the "Delete" button being right next to each other, making it easy to accidentally click both.

I've suggested a few times she switch to Gmail. But her business cards have her Yahoo email address, so she doesn't want to change it.

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This is from Yahoo Mail's Additional Terms of Service:
By using the Services, you consent to allow Yahoo!’s automated systems to scan and analyze all incoming and outgoing communications content sent and received from your account (such as Mail and Messenger content including instant messages and SMS messages) including those stored in your account to, without limitation, provide personally relevant product features and content, to match and serve targeted advertising and for spam and malware detection and abuse protection. Unless expressly stated otherwise, you will not be allowed to opt out of this feature. If you consent to this ATOS and communicate with non-Yahoo! users using the Services, you are responsible for notifying those users about this feature.

Bold font added by me - I find that last sentence rather objectionable. I wonder if Gmail has something similar in their TOS.

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