Yahoo! Mail

There are three giants for the consumer email services.

There's Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail, I mean, these are the huge giants.

They provide you a free service.

They may monetize the data.

Well, he has a brother named Trevor who's an attorney in Buffalo.

And Trevor did a forensic examination of what had transpired is that 17 years ago, this trooper, Jared Duffy, had created an ex-account, back then it was Twitter, and it was tied to a Yahoo Mail account.

It was just a routine, regular, there was nothing on it of any particular note, and it went fallow shortly after he started it, both the Twitter account and the Yahoo email account upon which it was based.

the Trooper Lieutenant Colonel Jared Duffy, he subsequently created other Gmail account, email, and a social media thing.

So these are the types of things we're going to be seeing in the case law more and more, I think.

I was most shocked by the fact that anybody is still using Yahoo Mail, but that's another story.

Right.

Well, there's that.

You know, when you, you know, you're supposed to give your email address to take advantage of this offer.

And you know that as soon as you do that, you're going to get 10,000 solicitations.

And so that's where my Yahoo and I use a Yahoo mail and I never bother opening any of them.

Yeah.

You're pushing against it.

And I will say that, you know, Yahoo Mail, the mail client, the app one, it's got amazing, it's got an amazing set of features.

It is a, it's a fantastic product.

And so we just need to get people... people that are using it to feel good about it again.

I mean, today, Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance each pull in over one hundred million users monthly.

Yahoo Mail still reaches about a third of Americans.

Those numbers are remarkable.

We're talking roughly seven hundred million users monthly altogether.

So it helped establish, um, Gmail as, as like a more, you know, it's a higher status thing.

Like Hotmail is trash, right? Like you don't want a Hotmail address or a Yahoo Mail address, right? But a Gmail address is like something professional.

Like why kind of focus on free at the time? Like, I mean, that was...

It was, it was pretty much all of this offered for free.

Mm-hmm.

And that was companies like Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail.

And what ended up happening was between 1993 to 1997, the volume of email went like that, and postal mail volume went like this.

So 1997 is when email volume was more email volume than postal mail volume.

So letters when, were going down relative to po- email.

And I thought this was a very dangerous time because if you read the privacy statements like of Hotmail and Gmail and all those companies, they said they own your email.

So people were signing up for free Hotmail, free Yahoo Mail, right? Oh, this is great.

I can send an email for free.

Yahoo [laughs] like Yahoo used to be, like...

It was the homepage everybody went to, and everybody used Yahoo Mail, and they slowly, like...

As people still use it, but it's not what it once was.

And in the early days of AI, it kind of felt like maybe Google would go that way, 'cause the...