If Yahoo! and Hotmail do not have protections against brute force password hacks, they are negligent in my opinion.
I know that for many of these services, they will lock you out after a small number of failed log-in attempts, but this is usually on a front-side browser interface. If they aren’t doing the same thing with pop/smtp/imap logins, they have really failed people.
The problem here is the business model.
Email holders aren’t their actual customers. Almost all yahoo and hotmail and gmail users pay no subscriptions.
All they are there for is selling ad space and mining data and selling it.
“Email holders aren’t their actual customers.”
No, email holders are their products... You are what they sell to corporations so they can target you with their ads.
The corporations are their actual customers.