Is Yahoo Mail Broken?
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This just in from an old friend who only gets pissed-off when it is justified. He says Yahoo Mail has been going downhill for awhile and has lately become unusable. Is this an isolated incident or does it affect all 200+ million Yahoo Mail customers? What’s your experience?
Here is his:
This is unacceptable.
We can log into Yahoo Mail.
We can read our email.
We can move or delete our email.
WE CANNOT SEND EMAIL.
When we try to send email, we are asked to enter a Captcha code. We then receive a Yahoo error message stating the message was not sent. Due to spam problem sending has been disabled on our account.
The message goes on to say the problem should clear itself up in a couple hours, it usually takes a few days.
I’ve reported this exact problem at least 5 times in the past week.
Most of our PCs are running Windows XP with the latest versions if IE and Firefox, specifically Firefox 3.5.8. Five of my family members’ email accounts are unable to send mail. Two households on our street are having problems with their Yahoo accounts. Other members of my family in other states are having problems with their accounts too. The problem spans several states and several ISPs.
We have kids on trips. Their travel arrangements are handled by email. If email does not work, they can’t get their tickets. My wife is looking for a new job, but she can’t apply for jobs or respond to queries. A coworker of mine was just laid off, I am trying to help him find a new job. With an unreliable email system it makes things difficult — and it is hurting yet another family’s livelihood.
Yahoo! Mail Error Form (Error Code 15)
* All fields required unless otherwise noted.
Attention:
We are in the process of upgrading all of our Yahoo! Mail servers as part of our ongoing efforts to give you the best Mail service possible. There is no need to complete this form because we already know that you’ve received this error. It is temporary and should clear up within a couple of hours. If it persists, please do come back and let us know. Thanks!
What are you going to do about this, Yahoo?????
Interesting. My wife just received in her business inbox a private email between two Yahoo Mail users. It was a personal message between two people unrelated to her and she was not included as a recipient in any manner. It just arrived in her emial inbox out of the blue.
The possibility that Yahoo Mail users’ private emails may be copied or even diverted to random users on the Internet is possibly an even bigger story than people being unable to send or receive at all.
This is bad. AT&T uses Yahoo as the provider for their email service now.
I just checked. My inbox on http://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/ has 1501 messages in it. Every Single One Is Spam!
Broken? I would say useless.
PS I haven’t used my yahoo email address in over 3 years.
Same for me, i get about 250 spam per day whih makes yahoo mail useless…this has been going on for over 4 years now
Gmail neately filters out 99.995 percent of spam and when I check the spam folder on Gmail, there is never anything in there that was not spam.
I s’pose it’s not the done thing to suggest that your friend check his anti-malware situation. Yahoo is probably receiving a number of complaints from upstream that too much botnet spam is originating thru Yahoo servers. Hence also the captcha.
Yahoo could be feeling some heat since Microsoft’s headline grabbing shutdown of the Waledac botnet. (The fact that they didn’t really shut it down is another story).
EVERYTHING yahoo is broken. I have reported obvious issues on the finance pages. Glaring math errors that a 5-year old would instantly notice. Once I actually got a response. They asked me to send a screen shot. My answer was look at your own d***n web site. The URL was already listed in my error report with a very detailed description. Sad.
Yahoo mail has been terrible since the very beginning. That is why I only use it to sign up for web sites that I know will spam me. I never use it for real communications. Gmail is much bettr for that, and google voice is a tremendously useful service. Just look at yahoo’s stock price and you’ll see proof that it’s a dying company.
Perhaps those users who received email exchanges by people unrelated to them are receiving part of my missing email correspondence
For the last 4 (!!) weeks now i have had the problem that I only receive some of the messages sent to my email address. For example, of five emails sent by the same originator within 1minute of each other, I might receive 3 but the missing two NEVER arrive in my mailbox. However, the originator doesn’t know the mail has not been delivered as he gets bo “undelivered” message back. This is fatal as important business correspondence simply gets lost without anyone realising it is lost.
All I get from Yahoo are semi-automatic customer service emails with a query number. All attempts at a personal contact have failed so far. As a small business customer I actually pay for this “service”. I am appalled and actually quite desperate by now.
I use yahoo for disposable email – any online transaction not banking gets the yahoo id. It works OK in the classic view in my experience. Have not seen the captcha on send but have noticed it’s slow and the search has been erratic the last couple of weeks.
Firefox 3.6 and Chrome, fwiw.
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Hiya, i’ve been come to your homepage and it seem really great. I’m create a family home page and struggling to make it look good. How hard was it to build your site? Could someone like me, a newbie make that? I always wanna to write in my page something like that. Just wanna let u know your blog seem broken when I visiting using IE 6.
I found your blog when I was searching on google, and it brought me right to what I was looking for. I’m going to add your rss feed to my Google Reader, I look forward to reading more of your thoughts
Sounds to me that the affected users are infected with a virus/malware/spybot/tick/bug/whathaveyou. Been using Yahoo mail for close to 10 years. Works everyday.
Stop giving away your email address to any web form you encounter. Disable Flash and quit visiting naughty sites.
But . . .Truth be told, been fiddling with beta Gmail for a couple of years. Yes they capture spam pretty darn good. But not good enough to give up a ten year relationship because some users don’t know how to protect themselves on the information superhighway. (Is that still a catch phrase for ‘internet’?)
Generally, it has worked fairly well, with the new interface. However, I know of at least two emails that never arrived in the last two months. It is obvious they are doing code updates to their web mail interface. Last week I could not open any emails, but reloading the webpage fixed that issue.
As email becomes more and more important, dropping emails is a problem they really need to fix. There should be no excuses for that.
PauleyB
I’ve been living in Baghdad for the last 11 months. My ISP must get its signal from Germany ’cause all the ads are in German. But I use my Yahoo account every day, never had any problems with it.
I’ve been using Yahoo mail for a dozen or so years – altho there is an occasional hiccup I have never had an issue with it.
Yahoo mail customer for 4 years…no SPAM, and no problems…love it…
Strange as this is the exact opposite of my experience with Yahoo Mail. I LOVE it. I’ve been using for years and really like the interface and how easy and intuitive it is.
I’ve tried Gmail and still have an account to try and maintain some geek cred. but, honestly, I really don’t like the Gmail GUI at all.
I almost never get spam in my YMail inbox and have found it does a great job of filtering.
Hi, everybody:
Just wanted to update the blog; we’ve been in touch with some of the individuals on here already. Yahoo! works hard to protect our outbound mail systems from abuse by spammers, and — as with any filter — there are rare cases when legitimate users may be misidentified. Other times, users have received CAPTCHA challenges like this one because a virus or “bot” is abusing their computer or account; in these latter cases, a virus scan and password change are highly recommended.
Based on the report from Cringely and as part of our standard system maintenance, we have continued to monitor our filters and make changes to ensure that legitimate users are not inaccurately blocked from sending spam, or that in the rare case where they are, the system does resolve itself quickly.
Fighting spam is something that we take extremely seriously. In 2009 alone, we blocked more than five trillion spam messages, resulting in a 30% improvement for our users, and we have continued to make strides in 2010. I believe that this was an isolated incident and hope that your problems have been resolved.
Sincerely yours,
Mark Risher
“Spam Czar”
For about a week after Bob posted this column, my Yahoo mail account went down several more times. One outage lasted almost 2 days, another a day. In the past week the service seems to have stabilized and is back to its normal, reliable operation. The code 15′s seem to be a thing of the past. Thanks.
For what it is worth the spam is greatly reduced. Thanks again.
I admire the valuable information you offer in your articles. I will bookmark your blog
I admire the valuable information you offer in your articles. I will bookmark your blog
I recently worked on a couple of computers, both from the same family living in to separate homes, who are using AT$T DSL on separate accounts. AT$T’s insistence on merging your existing yahoo account to your AT$T account can and will lead to internet password hell. Try having to reset your password, which AT$T is very good at screwing up should you make any account changes. When you do have to reset your password which you will due to no fault of your own, not only will you have to reset your router password, you will then have to reset all your other passwords linked to your account to match the new router password. One of the most ridiculous set of protocols I have ever witnessed in my 15 years of working with computers.
I would find it reasonable to assume what is going on with Yahoo Mail is more than likely being caused by AT$T and their workers in India’s inability to read and write english.
I AM A SMALL TIME USER OF YAHOO EM,AIL FOR QUITE A FEW YEARS. HAD NO PROBLEM SO FAR. LATELY,HOWEVER, HAD A PERSISTING PROBLEM AND IT REMAINS UNSOLVED . HERE IS THE STORY: MY FRIEND ALSO A USER OF YAHOO INSISTS THAT HE HAS SENT ME CLOSE TO FIFTEEN EMAILS IN THE PAST SIX MONTHS OR SO. I RECIEVED ONLY ONE
—-TODAY.
ON MY PART I SEARCED MY DELETED , SPAM AND ANY OTHER MOVED-TO PLACES. NO TRACE.
Well, now my email is all kinds of messed up, with missing email text that’s pretty much global, along with missing buttons. They say they’re updating, fine, but it was unannounced, and sort of ruined a project I was doing.
Not happy. This is the second time in a rather short period where there was something wrong, and this is with Classic. I feel trapped because most of my old stuff is still on there; nigh impossible to move by hand.
Thanks Strange_Bundle.
Thought something was wrong.. My emails too – no mail body, just the subject.
This is very unprofessional of Yahoo not to advise users beforehand. Have also noticed that for almost a month, Yahoo Messenger shows an alert that its voice services will be unavailable on 3/Mar in UK for a duration. They have not bothered to remove that alert even today!
I am reliant on Yahoo for all my important emails (old ones too). What a mess.
You’ll have not intended to do therefore, but I suppose you have got managed to express the mind set that a heap of individuals are in. The impression of wanting to assist, however not knowing how or where, is one thing a lot folks are going through.
Things like this does happen…we as users should always be on preventive mode specially when it involves important matters .
I often use two addresses :> just in case :>
I just had a virus cause havoc on my computer and I wanted to warn everyone to seriously think about getting some drive backup software to copy your hard drive – I wish I had!It’s taken me 2 days to get it fixed and I’ve lost almost everything.
Who cares about yahoo mail?
Gmail is way better and way faster.
No, I do not think so, but the style of your article i’ll like it
Don’t forget that all these mails are free to use…
Daniel
Scrabble Cheat
More of Yahoo is broken than mail. I joined a Yahoo Group several years ago, but somewhere along the way, something happened to my account and it won’t recognize any password that I enter. When I try to reset the password, the system returns an error message saying that there is a problem with my account and my password cannot be rest. It then suggests that I contact customer service.
The problem is that you CAN’T contact customer service, except through the web site. There is no phone number by which you may reach anyone at Yahoo who can or will help you with any sort of problem.
When I do go to the web site (again), I receive an automated response that tells me how to reset my password. No matter how many times I reply explaining that it’s not working, I receive the very same set of instructions back each time.
I’ve been unable to take part in the group for nearly three years.
As a technology consultant, I’ve been steering my clients away from doing anything with Yahoo.
Yahoo email search is the pits; I get a handful of results and mail sitting in my Inbox are openly ignored.
They’ve totally lost the game…
good morning, good blog.
There is an ongoing problem with Yahoo mail right now. Some mail is being delayed and some never shows up. It seems that certain senders have more problems than others. I’m the owner and administrator for a distribution mailing list and the majority of the mail sent to Yahoo addresses for that list never makes it through. Other list owners are reporting the same problem. Yahoo has been informed of the problem but they don’t seem to know what is going wrong, or at least they haven’t admitted to me that they know what is wrong. This has been going on for at least a week.
This is a interesting post.
Thanks for this interesting information.
For two days whenever I try to create a Yahoo account, and I enter a suggested Yahoo ID (whatever@yahoo.com) and click the “check” button to see if the ID is available, I get an endless spinning ball…
Just another Yahoo problem….to add to the list.
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Yahoo in the UK certainly seems to be broken. For many weeks email search has worked only intermittently for me (I almost always get “error code 20″), and after repeated fob-offs by their “Help” staff, I was last month told this is an issue that is affecting all their UK domain email. This is only the latest in a long series of email glitches and after more than a month, the problem has not yet been fixed. Looks to me like they are in technical terminal decline. I’m a paying user, but now clearly have to look for an alternative email provider.
Thank you for the sensible critique. Me & my neighbour were preparing to do some research about that. We got a good book on that matter from our local library and most books where not as influensive as your information.
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Interesting. My wife just received in her business inbox a private email between two Yahoo Mail users. It was a personal message between two people unrelated to her and she was not included as a recipient in any manner. It just arrived in her emial inbox out of the blue.
In my personal opnion that even though it was plain to see a professional article I have decided that there were still points to be expanded. I would like to hear your thoughts..and that of your other readers and whether or not they also think the same. Cheers
Yahoo mail has been bad, keeps on getting worse, and has no hope of ever getting me back as a customer!
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