Yahoo Mail (again)

Some blogs are fun to write, but this isn’t one of them. Unfortunately it’s been rattling around in my head for a couple of weeks, waiting to be written.

I’ve become gradually more miserable and disappointed as regular comments have appeared on an earlier blog about problems with Yahoo Mail. They’ve appeared for some time and have been particularly noticeable because they’ve required approval with the blog posting being so old.

To give you a taste, here are the 10 blogs with the most comments according to Serendipity.

Yahoo Mail Problems – 66 comment(s)
Despicable – 56 comment(s)
Request – What are your top three Oracle books? – 52 comment(s)
Out in Time! – 45 comment(s)
Sigh – 33 comment(s)
Why I’ve Switched Off Spam-Blocking – 31 comment(s)
An Open Letter to Steve Jobs – 28 comment(s)
If you’re gonna screw up … – 28 comment(s)
Leaving Pythian – 26 comment(s)
I’m so proud of our Scottish Parliament – 26 comment(s)

Not a large number of people, but certainly more than usual round here. It’s obvious from the tone of some of the comments that people have become dependent on email.

I think I’ve been having problems with my Yahoo mail this week, too, but it’s so difficult to tell. Any emails I’ve sent myself from work or that I know people have sent have turned up, but the occasional email from various lists turns up later than I was expecting, with an old timestamp on it, and I have very occasional response timeouts on the pop server. It was worse for a couple of weeks earlier this year, but I could never quite nail down a definite problem. I should emphasise, though, that there could be no problem at all because I’m still getting a *lot* of emails, just not quite as many as normal. (Maybe people are on holiday 😉)

That’s the tricky thing here, if emails are going missing, how on earth do you know and how do you ensure you’re not being slightly paranoid about it? At what point do you decide to follow the masses to Google? For what it’s worth, I do have a gmail account, but have been rather attached to my Yahoo account since I switched from Hotmail a long time ago. As someone who has worked in lots of different situations and with different companies, a stable home was always important to me. People need to be able to find me and, yes, I know I can use gmail to access my Yahoo account, but that won’t be much help if the problem is Yahoo’s mail infrastructure.

Various webmail providers have let me down in the past but I had been so pleased with the service from Yahoo, I took out a subscription for Yahoo a long time ago. For Andy C’s benefit, that’s why the Yahoo adverts aren’t annoying – I don’t have any adverts. (Oh, and I use the GUI version, but I sometimes think it was the release of that which started all this …) Which makes me a mug for paying when there are free services around and the sensible thing is to just switch my mail address to my own domain.

However, I do get annoyed with web companies. Every single one I’ve dealt with has let me down and customer service is utterly non-existent because they can’t hope to deal with the number of ‘customers’ they have. I hate to sound like an old man, but it pains me that all of those presentations and papers I read on cool, massive web infrastructures always carry some caveat about losing a little bit of data or suffering small outages. Give me the mainframe days, any day!

I’m disappointed in Yahoo – maybe in their rush to expand and compete, they’ve forgotten to take care of their customers. Oh, and in your excitement about Google, don’t assume that they’re not going to let you down one day 🙁

P.S. If you do happen to read this blog and you do think I haven’t answered one of your emails, maybe this is why and you should try re-sending it!