Monday morning annoyances

Just a couple of things that annoy me this morning with services that I used to use often and have been moving more and more away from because of stupid stuff like this. First there’s Hotmail. I really only use hotmail as an anonymous address to subscribe to a few mailing lists, and I have it listed as the contact for some domain things, in case my domain should be unreachable. But I’ve pretty much accepted that it’s crap. I have the junk filter setup to only accept messages that come from my “safe” list. The rest get sent to a junk mail folder that I browse through to make sure I haven’t missed anything, and then delete daily, at least. When I’m out of town, I reset my preferences to delete junk mail immediately, instead of putting it in the folder for me to check, so I don’t get a high volume of mail, taking up all of my allocated space. Yet, somehow, when I return there are always a handful of messages that get put in the junk folder and not deleted. How does that happen? What is special about those spams compared with the spam hotmail does delete?

Secondly, there’s Yahoo! I still use the free Geocities hosting for my other, more personal site. Lately whenever I go to login to a Yahoo! service, I’m prompted not only for my password but the answer to a question, like my zip code, or what pets I have, etc. Obviously, they are tying this together with the username to create a marketing profile. Right now, answering the “extra” question is optional, but it’s not like Yahoo! hasn’t developed a nice little track record of changing policies in midstream. I guess if they get much more intrusive, I’ll just move all the content from that site and stick it in a sub-directory of this site. I’d rather not do that, it’s been in existence for 5 years now, I might lose some readers in the move. But there is definitely a limit to what I’ll put up with.

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