Yahoo Mail: how to opt out of interest-based ads
We told you in April that Yahoo will retire Yahoo Mail Classic in the beginning of June 2013 forcing users to use the new Yahoo! Mail with no option whatsoever to go back. If that is not bad enough already, the company announced that it will start to scan user emails to display contextual-based advertising to its users.
The scanning of emails is automated and works pretty much the same way as Google does on its Gmail service. Mails are scanned for topics of interests, say cars, computers or babies, and ads are displayed to you based on those keywords.
Yahoo! notes that you will automatically accept the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy which includes the "acceptance  of automated content scanning and analyzing of your communications content".
If you are using Yahoo Mail and dislike this, you are left with little options. While it is possible to opt-out of interest-based and contextual advertisement, it is not clear if Yahoo will not scan your emails if you do.
Opting out
Visit the Ad Interest Manager on the Yahoo! Privacy website. Here you find the interest categories that you are currently assigned to and the status of the interest-based ads feature.
You can turn off interest-based advertisement completely with a click on the opt out button on the page, or turn off select interest categories instead.
When you do, you will not receive any personalized advertisement on Yahoo, or only personalized ads based on the categories that you have left turned on. Advertisement will however still be displayed.
What if you do not want your emails scanned at all?
Both Gmail and Yahoo! Mail users have no opt-out option to prevent the scanning of their emails by the service. It is not clear if emails will get scanned by the service even if you are using a desktop email client or another email provider that supports IMAP.
Yahoo! Mail users who do not want to use the new interface have little options. Yahoo! suggests to connect to the service using IMAP instead. You can use a desktop client like Thunderbird for example to do so. Here are the important parameters that you may need:
- Incoming server: imap.mail.yahoo.com
- Incoming port: 993 with SSL
- Outgoing server: smtp.mail.yahoo.com
- Outgoing port: 465 with SSL OR 587 with SSL/TTS
- Username: your full Yahoo! email address
- Password: your Yahoo! account password
The only other option that Yahoo! suggests is to close the account.
Closing Words
Yahoo! does what Google has been doing for a long time and users who condemn the company for it should condemn Google at the same time for it. If you do not want your emails scanned, you do need to switch to a provider who does not. There is however no guarantee that the new provider won't implement a similar feature in the future.
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You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!