Today Yahoo Ends Support for "Legacy" Yahoo Messenger. This is What you Need to Know.

by Ship & Bunker News Team
Friday August 5, 2016

Yahoo today will end support for its "legacy" Messenger platform. Introduced 18 years ago, it has been the messenger of choice for the bunker industry.

As Ship & Bunker reported in June, Yahoo says that from August 5, 2016, it will instead focus only on its "new" platform, and from today the two will no longer be compatible.

Yahoo has told Ship & Bunker that the old desktop messenger app (the one you've been using) will definitely no longer work after today, but your conversation history will be archived in Yahoo Mail and exportable via a download link.

The "new" Messenger platform is a consumer product and as such has numerous compliance issues - such as a lack of local archiving capabilities - which means it has been largely dismissed by the industry as an acceptable replacement.

Instead, the bunker industry now looks to have now turned to Skype as its preferred messenger, as indicated in a Ship & Bunker poll that had over 650 global respondents.

Skype

By July many industry players had already told Ship & Bunker directly they were moving to Skype, and since then many other major names - including Bomin and Monjasa - have told us they were adding their names to that growing list.

In the case of Monjasa, they will join Peninsula Petroleum and Ocean Connect Marine among the smaller group of bunker players also using ICE Messenger.

Worth noting is that Skype does not appear to meet all the required compliance criteria, and for that reason, outside of the bunker industry ICE Messenger seems to be an extremely popular choice for traders.

Indeed, one reader who tried to sign up for a free trial of ICE IM was told that it was "absolute insanity" from the volume of interest.

Something to keep in mind is that this also means oil and bunker traders will now potentially be on different communication platforms.

Another complication to keep in mind is that there are actually two Skype's - Skype, and Skype for Business.

Skype for Business is not, as the name suggests, simply Skype with added functionality for business users, but rather is a rebranded version of a different system previously known as Microsoft Lync.

While Skype and Skype for Business users are in theory able to talk to each other, the reality seems to be that it's not quite as smooth as Microsoft would have us believe.

A number of Ship & Bunker readers have told us they are having problems communicating between the two systems.

The trick seems to be "regular" Skype users need to be connected to a Microsoft Account to talk to Skype for Business users - read more here: https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA12315/can-i-contact-skype-for-business-users-from-skype

And a final thought for those wondering why Yahoo would end support for its "legacy" messenger.

Since the decision was announced in June, subsequent events suggest this could be the end of Yahoo full stop - at least as we know it today.

Once valued at $125 billion, last week it was announced the former Internet giant was being sold to Verizon for what Forbes described as "chump change" in the "saddest $5 billion deal in tech history."

This week it is dealing with news that details of 200 million stolen Yahoo accounts are being sold on the dark web.

Maybe then, the bunker industry moving on from Yahoo isn't such a bad thing.