Woes with Yahoo Mail

I guess by now everyone knows about the GMail incident affecting millions… (6 downtime events in 6 months ?)

Then there’s the other under-reported problems with Yahoo! Mail.

Yup ! No service or product is unbreakable… Only Larry Ellison is in denial (I always say… then comes hundreds of patches for all their products)

Now back to Yahoo! Mail… if you look at the big 3 “Free” Email providers (for non-US users), namely Live.com Mail, GMail and Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! Mail stands out in the sense, it is the ONLY one don’t does not provide “free” POP3/SMTP or IMAP service to anyone unless you pay for it for “Yahoo! Mail Plus”.

Basically Yahoo! wants to force you to use browser for Email access and refuse to provide an offline mode that others provide. The only other “offline” mode available is via your smart phone in-built client or using Yahoo! Go which claims to be the “The best Internet experience for your phone. Period.”. Being there, done that… it does not wow for me.

So I and like everyone else is forced to use YPOPs! which was previously named YahooPOPs! until Yahoo stopped them. Basically YPOPs emulated a local POP/SMTP service on your local machine while using regular HTTP commands to pull and send your emails.

It was working fine until Yahoo put a stop to it recently… It was not the first time nor the last. I cannot really blame Yahoo for it as any change in HTTP Email services will break YPOPs!

So I tried to use their email service via the browser. Oops… no joy.

My next batch of woes are with SPAM. Lots and lots of them…false positives.

Look at it ! My regular mailing lists are still flagged as SPAM !

My problem is that the Yahoo’s SPAM filters does not learn. I am using Yahoo since the start of their service in 1997. So every time I login I need to do email recovery. Mostly by then, the email is too old to act upon. Yes, I actually missed some important stuff due to late discovery of the email trapped in the SPAM filter.

Yes, I used to be a SGI Geek way back in the heydays… but yet I need to recovery SGI emails every time till today !

sigh…………………………