One of the most annoying part regarding the Yahoo Mail featuresets is that the free features offered by Yahoo differ on a country to country basis. While advanced features like POP & Forwarding are not available for free to users having email on the yahoo.com domain, they are available to most of the users on other country specific yahoo domains like yahoo.co.uk, yahoo.co.uk, yahoo.com.au or yahoo.co.in !!
To further confuse matters, the features also depend upon what are the Country & Content settings selected in the Account Information of the Yahoo user. So if somebody on yahoo.co.uk changes his settings to English-US, then his POP & forwarding gets disabled even though he is a yahoo.co.uk user. For a yahoo.com user, no matter what settings you select, there is no chance of POP & Forwarding getting enabled.
What Yahoo really wants to achieve is a mystery. Why does Yahoo want only its US based users not to use free POP & Forwarding and make them pay for using these services?
New users who needs these features would most likely register on some non yahoo.com domain and avail these features for free. The only users who are really affected are the old users who don’t want to change their email address and are stuck on the yahoo.com address.
If Microsoft does take over Yahoo eventually, lets hope Micosoft removes this disparity. Otherwise it will continue to see the exodus of Yahoo mail users to Gmail !!
