Help me fix out-of-control yahoo mail - please

In free yahoo mail,
Few days ago I noticed there is a box on the right side that has to do with updating info from few of my contacts.
It's useless to me and seemed harmless. I never used it, never asked for it.
Until yesterday.

Suddenly, when I start yahoo mail, it goes completely crazy updating something from hundreds of contacts, none of which I know (Toyota? Olivia somebody? so many of them).
So I tried to find some settings, and under a Contacts tab, Tools, there's an option to share my updates and to see updates in yahoo mail.
Both were checked. So I unchecked them.

Restarted Opera browser, relogged into yahoo.
The flood of connections and updates continued. These connections time out in a second but you can't even read the TCPview it scrolls so fast.

Then I found another setting related to sharing -- share what's important across the web. Over my dead body.
Here I unchecked to Allow people to find my profile ... and Allow my connections to share information about me ...

The flood of connections and updates continues.
IPs I caught in the firewall all belong to yahoo.
Same behavior in IE8 which I practically never use anyway.

When did all this change in yahoo, what is it really doing, and how can I stop it. All I want is mail.

 

Hi...

I have been using the 'Classic' version for years, and don't see what you mean...and this is in Opera.

 

I'm guessing this may be part of what's going on - http://www.ehow.com/how_5894992_disable-yahoo-chat-mobile-text.html

Maybe this too - http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/answers/socialnetwork/psnetwork-05.html

Since I run sans Java, my look's, I'm sure, are quite different than your own.

 

Thanks for answering

Classic mail here as well, and Opera 10.54 (updated just the other day ... hmmm maybe that's related)
At this point I still don't know what's going on.
I did find three major privacy settings with zillions of little other settings each and shut it all off.
That stopped the updates from some people-list whom I do not know.
I could've sworn I had all that stuff shut off long ago. But yahoo keeps changing and I may have missed something important.

But the updating of some sort continues. I watched it for about 30 seconds and had 625+ ports in a TIME_WAIT state. I did find a fairly quick solution: Click the refresh button to change it from redX to normal green-refresh.
It may have to do with suppressing most ads. But I've done it in Opera for years and it never messed up. The reason I say is because on top, on the address bar it says Downloading 1 of 27, 2 of 27... or Elements 30 of 33 or Document...something, and round and round it goes. So these are some page elements.

If you can think of anything else, I'll watch here. The two links you gave were close, but not quite yet.
Incidentally, yahoo chat ports I've blocked in the firewall ages ago and it hasn't caused any problems. But this stuff is all remote port 80. Can't block that.

 

In my mail options ... there is a Ignore Updates from this person section - it showed all the people whom I get updates from. In Contacts/Tools/Seeing Updates from ... to the right there is a Stop Getting Updates option.


I took a look at my mail options a couple of days ago ... the updates I get are from people I know on my friend list. I wonder do you have Yahoo Messenger? have you logged into it recently and taken a look at who is on your friends list - inside Yahoo Messenger. Maybe you have been spammed by friend adding type bots, unless you log into Y!-Messenger and deny their friend request those people are attached to your account friend list.

 

This could help also.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=274290