Darkoshi

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.

I am curious if it is legal for various political fund-raising groups to send email and paper communications which imply they are written by or at least written with the approval of a certain candidate, and containing their supposed signature at the end, when the same mailing contains the legal blurb "This communication is not authorized buy any candidate or candidate's committee."

Is there no law against pretending to be a public person and sending mail in their name?

In this case, the mail is from the Democratic National Committee, and while Joe Biden probably doesn't disapprove of the fund-raising mailing, I still don't understand how it can be legal for them to print his signature (along with the text "With gratitude, Joe Biden, President of the United States") if he didn't "authorize" it.

Okay..... I now remembered that Biden isn't a "candidate" anymore. But I still wonder if he specifically authorized them to send that message with his signature. I suppose it is possible.

A few years ago I created an email folder where I move political donation appeals rather than deleting them right away. I often don't trust them; it seems an easy way for scammers to get people to send them money, by pretending to raise money for a certain cause. If I wanted to donate, I would instead go to the official website to do it. But I created the email folder to track how often the same senders spam me and if they continue to do so after I unsubscribe.

That folder now comes in handy now to check how often the above occurs. I only found one or two examples where the email is purportedly written by the candidate and also has the "not authorized by..." clause.

There are several examples where instead of "Not authorized by", it actually says "Authorized by [the candidate]" or says "Paid by..." without mentioning if it is authorized or not.

Related info:
When Words Are Not Enough: FEC Fines Candidate Committee for Omitting Disclaimer Box in Mailings (March 2007)

If the public communication is authorized by a candidate, his or her authorized committee or an agent thereof but is paid for by any other person, the disclaimer must clearly state that the communication is paid for by such other person and is authorized by the candidate, committee or agent.
...
If the communication is not authorized by a candidate, his or her committee or an agent thereof, the disclaimer must state the full name and permanent street address, telephone number or World Wide Web address of the person who paid for the communication, and that the communication is not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

I suppose that emails and mailings sent to a specific person may not be considered "public communication", so maybe that is why not all of the ones I get mention if they are authorized or not. And maybe some of those really are from scammers too.

...

WAIT! Now I see that this paper mailing has another paper in it which is purportedly written and signed by Kamala Harris, which ALSO has that blurb on it, "This communication is not authorized buy any candidate or candidate's committee"! So I'm back to my original question.

The masked phone number part of this sounds useful for sites like Google that nowadays require a phone number for setting up an account.

https://relay.firefox.com/

Protect your identity with secure phone and email masking

Our secure, easy-to-use email and phone masks help keep your identity private so you can sign up for new accounts anonymously, stop spam texts and junk calls, and get only the emails you want in your inbox.
...
Limited-time only: ⁨Relay Premium⁩ + ⁨Mozilla VPN⁩ for ⁨$6.99⁩/month

⁨Mozilla VPN⁩ protects you from tracking & surveillance while you’re gaming, online banking, or getting work done. Add it to ⁨Firefox Relay⁩ for ⁨40%⁩ off.

Your 1-year plan includes:
Email masking
Phone masking
Mozilla VPN
...
Use ⁨Relay⁩ email masks and phone masks everywhere

Get secure, random email masks and a unique, masked phone number to use any time a website, app, store, or restaurant asks for your information.

...
We’ll forward emails, phone calls, and texts to you

Rest assured, senders will never know your real email address or real number. You can even reply to texts and emails without sharing your real identity.

Ah, but based on the wording on that page, it sounds like you only get a single masked phone number to use. So you couldn't generate multiple ones for different sites. Unless you pay for multiple instances of the service, I suppose.

But still, I've been thinking about signing up for a VPN service, and getting a masked phone number along with it would be useful, maybe.

I wonder about the "stop junk calls" part though. It seems that whenever you get a new phone number, you're bound to get junk calls trying to reach previous people who had that phone number. Add to that any new junk calls caused by you giving websites that number. Presumably all those calls get forwarded to your real phone. So I don't see how it would reduce junk calls. Are you able to discard one masked number and get another at will? If so, how often?

I would need to look into the details of this some more.

In my SoundCloud notification settings, "New post by followed user" is selected under the Email column.
But I haven't been getting any notification emails, even though the people I'm following have uploaded many new tracks.

Do any of you use email notifications for SoundCloud, and do they work for you?

If it's not a SoundCloud bug causing me not to get them, I suspect my email provider may be blocking them as spam. But this email account doesn't have a spam folder; suspected spam is simply blocked, so there's no way for me to be sure. That's always made me uneasy and will probably eventually make me stop using that email.

I tried to be nonchalant about it in the prior post, but have been in low-level panic mode since that evening. Only a low level because:

- for the time being at least, I can still access all my Gmail accounts via IMAP.
- I always save emails and attachments to files on my computer as I read them, so being locked out of Gmail *won't* result in me losing any data. (But it's time to backup my computer files; I don't yet have that automated.)
- I have many different accounts and emails, and only a few of them are Gmail/Google.
- I suspect that if I try to log in from my own house, it may well succeed, as maybe that's the IP address I last logged in successfully from.
- If absolutely necessary, I could find some phone number, possibly a temporary throw-away one, to use for the account (though based on a link below, even this might not suffice!)

Still, it feels like the rug has been pulled out from under me, that the rules have been changed, that it's no longer sufficient to know your own password and security answers, that regardless of all that, an unreachable machine can decide to no longer let me in based on whatever criteria *it* chooses.

Once I am able to log in, I can finish deleting any remaining content and close down the account(s) to ensure this never happens again. I've already signed up for two replacement non-Gmail email accounts, and have switched over my LJ and DW accounts to them.

The thing that pains me most to consider is closing down my YouTube channel and removing all the videos that I've posted there over the years. That's the account I *was* able to login to the other day. But again, the rug is gone; I feel like I could lose access to it any time now. I could leave the channel and videos up and simply not post anything new there. But I don't like the idea of not being able to take the videos down in the future, if I someday wanted to.

I could delete the videos from YouTube and upload them to Vimeo instead, but I've never felt they were good enough for Vimeo, so I don't know if I really would. Do Vimeo embeds work in Dreamwidth? I don't remember.

.

It's not only Google; I no longer trust any of my free accounts to remain accessible. It sounds like what may trigger this problem is deleting cookies (so that your device is not "recognized") and using your device in different locations or with different ISPs (so that your IP number is not recognized). Possibly also using various different browsers. I've been doing that for years already though, and haven't had this problem with Gmail before now. But I don't login to these accounts on the web very often, as I mostly access them via IMAP and Thunderbird, so I honestly don't know which browser I used the last time, or whether it was from this house or that one. I recall a similar problem with Yahoo some years back, though that may have been triggered by entering my password wrong too many times before getting it right.

The below posts are all recent; I wonder if Google's changed their security algorithms in a bad way lately.

Based on this post, even giving Google a phone number may not be enough to prevent being locked out: Locked out of Google account for NO reason. How can I ensure this never happens again? (2020/10/22)

Locked out of google account despite multiple correct recovery answers (2020/11/29)

been locked out of my google account for now reason and account recovery does not work (2020/10/18)

"You might have attempted the recovery form many times in the last 24 hours. Try to wait for one week before attempting another account recovery form (do not attempt to sign in or submit account recovery form during the one week period).
After you wait for one week, kindly use the account recovery form: https://accounts.google.com/signin/recovery from previous logged in location/ip address and used device/computer for the account as Google will also check the location and used device/computer. "

What it's like to get locked out of Google indefinitely (2020/10/31)

Microsoft Outlook users had the same kind of problem: (2018/04/13)

I logged into YouTube in my other browser to leave some "likes" on some of these videos. The main YouTube page showed a video posted recently by one of the channels I'm subscribed to. I started watching it and then realized I haven't gotten any email notifications from YouTube in a long time, to let me know of new videos posted by the people I'm subscribed to.

YouTube Will Stop Sending Email Notifications to Alert Channel Subscribers to New Content

...as of August 13th, 2020, YouTube will no longer send out email notifications to your channel subscribers whenever you upload a new video.

According to YouTube's internal data, less than 0.1% of these emails are ever opened, while users have also complained that such notifications are an annoyance in their ever-cluttered inboxes.

"We didn't see any impact to watch time when we experimented with turning off these emails."

Gah! It stands to reason that I'd be in the 0.1% of anything, yet again.
Although when I got the emails, I didn't click the links in them as that would open them in the wrong browser. And I didn't necessarily load the images in those emails. So they probably weren't even counting me in the 0.1% even though I did use the emails to let me know when there was new content available for me to watch.

And of course it didn't impact watch time, because I watch so much other junk. But now I won't be notified of the good content I specifically subscribed to??!! Gah!

And not to mention, it's been hard in the past to keep getting the emails too, because it seems that they never *did* send them by default. I had to go into the settings and select to receive emails for each channel that I was subscribed to. So why they wouldn't still keep that as an option if you *choose* it...

:: the world makes no sense ::

Gee, I wonder if there's a third-party service that would be able to check your YouTube subscriptions for you, and email you whenever something new has been posted...

Oh, and I just realized that YouTube never bothered emailing *me* to let me know about this, either as someone who posts videos on YouTube or as someone who watches them. Which of course, as YouTube doesn't CARE about those 0.1% of viewers, why would they?

My Thunderbird email program prompted me to update, and thinking it was one of the usual monthly updates, I clicked to allow it. Typing the new version number into my notes file, I realized it had jumped from v60.9.1 to v68.4.1!

Checking the Add-ons Manager, it shows that the 2 add-ons I had been using have now been disabled as "incompatible with Thunderbird 68.4.1".

39 ways to close your emails

Some of my favorites from that page, including the comments:

Be well, do good deeds, and keep in touch
Confusion to your enemies
Tag. You’re it
The end (for now)
Up, up, and away,
Ta,
Happy Trails
Ciao for now
Upward and onward
osmosis, amoeba
Have a magical day

It's so easy nowadays with the internet to look up information and to share information with others.

When I was a kid, if I wanted an answer to a question, I'd have to ask people, or look it up in the encyclopedia or dictionary that we had at home, or go to a library and search through books. But even if you did all that, the answer might not be found.

That isn't to say that I spent much time as a child searching the library for answers to hard questions.

But still. Even if you had a whole library of books, where would you look up the answer to a question like, "Why do my shoes squeak and creak, and how can I make them stop?"

Sometimes you can figure out answers by yourself. In the past, when my shoes squeaked, it was usually due to friction between the tongue and the top of the shoe, or due to small holes in the sole. I found ways to prevent those noises.

This time, the culprit was neither the tongues nor the soles. Internet searching provided some answers I hadn't thought of. The foam layers on one of the insoles* were coming apart. So I glued them back together with silicon sealer. That fixed one of the squeaks. I also sprinkled talcum** powder under the insoles, and after a few repetitions, that got rid of most of the creaks. One of the creaks kept coming back, which I now suspect was due to a thick thread that was under the insole, perhaps letting air in. I trimmed the thread. For the time being, the squeaks and creaks are all gone. Yay.

*I originally thought that insoles are glued in, but in many cases they aren't, and you can simply pull them out.
**Corn starch didn't sound like a good idea, as it might get pasty when wet. Nor did I want my shoes to smell like baby powder. Luckily, I found that non-baby-scented talcum powder can be found in the pharmacy foot-care section. The one I got smells like wintergreen!

Anyway, I was thinking about the above, and also thinking about what will happen to that kind of data over time. People die. Then what happens to the data they've posted to the internet? If they had their own website domain, and if no one takes over paying the domain fees or web hosting provider fees after they die, their website will be gone. If they've posted data on other sites, then it will depend on how long those sites stay around. Websites are not permanent, and most will disappear or radically change over time. Some data may get archived on various sites. But the Internet Archive, for instance, while it has old webpages, isn't very searchable in the normal sense. Google's cache is sometimes useful, but I'm not sure how long Google maintains cached data, once the original websites are gone.

So the answers that I can find today while doing an internet search, may someday no longer be there to be found. Or may no longer be found in the same places. New people will have to post the answers in new places.

Another useful piece of info I found today is that if your Lotus Notes locks up for a long time whenever you paste rich text from a webpage into an email, check the Lotus Notes proxy settings. Make sure it doesn't list an old proxy server which is no longer valid.

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 "@yahoo.com" part. Then I changed it to include the @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 @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 (@yahoo.com seems to be required here, otherwise emails don't get sent right)