Yahoo! Mail users will be forced to switch from Mail Classic to its new version from today. The new version of Yahoo! Mail was launched last December, and requires you to sign up to new a Terms of Service, which allows Yahoo! to scan your mail to deliver ‘relevant advertising and abuse protection.’
You can opt out of targeted ads if you want, through Yahoo!’s Ad Manager , but you can’t opt out of email scanning. Yahoo! Mail is not the first service to include mail scanning, and Gmail also does it.
It’s important to point out that most email services do email scanning as a way to filter out spam, and that the scanning is done by computer, so this is not about a person at Yahoo! reading your private email. Automated email scanning ‘technology looks for patterns, keywords, and files in Mail, Messenger, and other communications content’. This can be used to give you adverts better suited to you and to potentially help with cases of abuse.
Yahoo! Mail, Outlook.com and Gmail have all been overhauling their services in the hope of attracting more users. Outlook.com is the most radical, having ditched the Hotmail name.
Are you a Windows 10 user? Look no further than the downloadable Windows 10 edition of Yahoo Mail.