I’ve been a portal user for over ten years now, and I’m here to tell ya, storing all my email online in Yahoo’s servers beats having it resident on my home machine in Outlook all to HECK…for one thing, when your home machine goes down, crashes, whatever, and you haven’t been religious about backing up your hard drive (the performace of which, on Outlook requires several Druids, an Alchemist and a Witchdoctor) you’ve lost all your back archives and have to start from scratch, or pay a technician half the cost of a new LAPTOP just to scavenge the files from your defunct drive… whereas if they’ve been online in Yahoo, or Excite, all along, you fire up your new hard drive or new machine, log on and BLAM, all your stuff is right where you’ve left it. Nice.

It’s very liberating to NOT be beholden to Microsoft for a lot of stuff, and email ranks right up there in the top THREE for me.

Of course, this isn’t for everybody… Jason Bourne, for example….

Can you enlighten me as to where I can read about the supposed death of Yahoo? I’m not sure how much time you’ve spent travelling abroad, in the Middle East particularly, but Yahoo is huge over there. When I was in Baghdad at the end of 2005, there were even Yahoo ads up in the Baghdadi versions of bodegas!

Yahoo is still incredibly influential in Syria and Jordan, and other countries in the region. I think its important to remember there are global markets and too often we look at the death or obsoleseteness of a company/product or its movement out of the public hip western-internet mind as the death of that thing, but there is a whole other world out there beyond the borders of the English-speaking realm…