It's a running joke in my industry - I ask a new business owner or employee of a company for their contact information and try not to let them see me cringe when they give me an email address ending in yahoo.com.
You don't want to tell them it's a mistake. You just met them. You really don't want to offend them. They probably have lots of contacts that use it. They find it convenient. They've had it for years.
Let me give you an analogy that puts it in perspective. If you just met someone and they crawled out of a giant pool of bacteria-infected animal droppings crawling with flies and maggots, didn't wash their hands, seemed to have no idea they were even in such a mess, and then smiled and offered to shake your hand.... would you do it?
Yeah, it's about that bad.
Maybe you heard about the Yahoo hack in September of this year? The one that revealed they had over 500 millions user accounts hacked? Yeah, that was bad. What was worse is that the hack happened in 2014 and they just found out about it in September of 2016.
Did you hear about the 1 BILLION users they just reported hacked in the news today? Yeah, this isn't just MORE accounts they discovered were hacked. This is an entirely separate breach. More embarrassing is that this is not only the largest hack in Internet history, but that it went undiscovered for the last three years until now! The breach occurred in 2013 and no one caught it until December of 2016.
Even more embarrassing than that - there are only around 3 billion internet users in the entire world. This hack alone suggests two things.
First, that 1/3 of the world doesn't listen to reason and insists on playing in Yahoo's pig pen.
Secondly, they are basically collectively responsible for letting a full half of the world's users get hacked and it takes them a couple YEARS to let their users know about it!
We've been telling users for years that Yahoo accounts get hacked daily. Every single day we get at least one email from some user that's had their account compromised and has it used to send out spam to their contacts. They shrug and don't pay attention. It's like telling your children not to eat mud pies. They know it's bad because you said so, but it's so much fun! It's like knowing to wash your hands after you visit the restroom, or not to eat food that's been dropped on the ground, or not to lick the open sores on a leper's face and hands.... come on! It's literally THAT obvious, yet people still do it!
I'm not even going to go into the massive amount of personal financial risk users face by using Yahoo for personal banking, business banking, access to other accounts that can be gleaned from hacking your yahoo account. Simply the knowledge that merely using it means you're most likely going to infect your contacts with malicious emails should be enough to get users to stop. It's the internet version of Herpes and yet people spread it around knowingly with absolutely no remorse.
If you insist on using a free email service, for the love of peanut butter, please use Gmail!
If you insist on using Yahoo, well, there's nothing we can do except try to educate people.
