Dear Yahoo Mail: Stop trying to "improve"

The BBQ Pit
#1

Yahoo Mail worked just fine for a long time, but as we know they’ve been making changes lately.

I wish they would stop.

I think it would be great if Yahoo stopped trying to make it all things to all people, stopped trying to make it look more like Gmail, just stopped “improving” it for the most part. It’s reached the point, as some computer technology seems to, where the “improvements” have rendered it nearly unusable.

On my PC, it might work or it might not on a given day. Sometimes buttons are missing. Sometimes clicking the buttons does nothing. Even when it does work, the “improvements” are more annoying than helpful. Used to be when I’d delete a message I’d go right back to the inbox. Not any more - now I get a placeholder page telling me I just deleted a message and I have to click again to go back to the inbox. There’s no setting for this in the options that I can find. Minor thing, but representative of how Yahoo has been making “improvements”.

When accessing it on my iPad, it hardly ever works correctly in the Safari browser. I choose to use the browser because I chafe at the idea of installing an app - extra software that I shouldn’t need. There are people who will tell me I’m being stubborn on this point. Fair enough, but I still don’t see why YM shouldn’t work in a browser. Lately I get pages telling me simultaneously that I have messages, but showing a blank list. Have to refresh over and over to make it work. Sometimes when composing messages they inexplicably won’t send - they go into a temporary folder created just for this purpose. Why? Who knows?

How about we go back to YM the way it was five or ten years ago? Forget all the bells and whistles and just make the basics of online mail simply WORK. I realize there are modern security concerns, but I don’t think that’s what has been causing these issues. I suspect it’s just their tinkering with it.

YM is free, and I appreciate that. But I’d appreciate it more if it just worked.

#2

I wish they would stop improving lots of stuff. I have sent many a nasty e-mail to apple about their improvements to ITunes. It was an improvement only if that word means uglier and less user-friendly

I used the product and liked it, so…fuck me. I guess I ain’t the targeted customer.

#3

I’m sorry, OP, but I must confess that I didn’t read a word of your post.

However, unless it was a verbose version of “I fully disagree with my post’s title”, then I agree 100% with whatever it was you typed.

#4

Facebook does this same sort of shit about every three to six months it seems. I haven’t used Yahoo mail in ages, so I have no idea what the new changes are, but I can appreciate the sentiment. I don’t want to feel like an old dinosaur, but with some websites, I feel the changes are just arbitrary moving shit around and making it hard to find things, the worst kind of change you can make.

#5

But, but… if you don’t change something at least every year to incorporate whatever someone else came up with, all the trade writers will say you have stopped innovating! Everyone will say your company is doomed and has been passed by! Think Of the [del]Children[/del] Stock Price!

#6

I enjoy the frisson of irony I get when I report the exact same spam email that I’ve already reported four thousand times already, and which is STILL getting through their filter, and I get the message “Thank you! Every email you report helps our SpamGuard perform better!” If that were true, Yahoo SpamGuard would currently be ruling a millenium-long golden age intergalactic empire of universal peace and prosperity.

#7

Yahoo’s changes to their personal page setup make their mail rehab look sane. I used to use my yahoo personal page as my home page. I’d actually spend some time on it catching up on news, mail, and weather. It also had my go to bookmarks. After the recent changes I finally got my bookmarks to show up after repeated attempts.

Now I don’t bother to use it for anything but bookmarks and soon I will migrate those to a resource that is formatted better. I’d lie to met the Yahoo who thought that huge side margins taking up 1/3 of my screen space was an improvement.

#8

In that case, it’s a bunch of cosmetic shuffles to hide the fact that they turned off all the privacy settings again.

#9

Hal, you must be using some sort of Bizarro Yahoo Mail, if you think the changes actually make it better.

I’ve been using it for about 15 years now, it’s not because it was pretty, it’s because it worked. Now, when my filters send mail directly to a folder, I can’t fucking see which folder it went to unless I open the “folders” menu that covers up the main list. Except, of course, on my Mac, where the Folders menu is transparent, so I get to see both lists at the same time, written over top of each other.

I can use the “basic” mail option which allows me to see all my folders on the left side of the screen, convenient. Of course, I now have to click 3 or 4 selections to get the mail ordered with the newest on top, and put me correctly on the first page. Clearly the default ordering for “advanced” mail should be different than the ordering on “basic” mail.

Then, of course, are the “improvements” to Yahoo Groups. In the bad old days, you would have a list of posts, you would click on one and get to read the whole thing… positively barbaric. Thankfully, with this new version, I get to click on the message, then click the “refresh” button and it will load the message. Going back is just as convenient, hit the back button, then refresh.

If you give me a choice of boring or annoying, I’m taking boring every time.

#10

I’m just about there. The latest and greatest “My Yahoo” improvements suck.

#11

I think he was saying just the opposite, but that is a bit of a hard sentence to parse.

#12

Glad I’m not the only one cussing them out.

#13

Good gravy, I wish they’d put yahoo mail back to its extremely easy to use, functional, incredibly fast, never error-ed version of about 2 versions ago.

Or at least let me keep the old versions.

This new mail is crap, was crap on launch, is still crap like a year later, and will always be vastly inferior and slower.

Yahoo needs to fire both the person who decided to change it and the person who came up with what the changes were. Then they need to be strung up by their toes over a pit of acid, filled with sharks with laser beams attached to their heads.

#14

I just set up an MSN homepage. I finally got sick of MyYahoo’s refusal to accept that I don’t live in Sunnyvale, CA.

#15

It’s been stable lately for me, but a month or two ago it was unavailable at random times. I use it on three different platforms, and it was up on some but not on others. That has nothing to do with the look and feel, that was just that they weren’t competent enough to make changes that didn’t crash it.

As for cussing them out, the Yahoo Feedback board had thousands of people cussing them out and telling them to put things back. At least you can edit titles on mail you forward now - they had broken that too.

Yahoo is mostly where my spam goes, so I’m not a heavy user. It is tolerable now.

#16

Can’t do that if they aren’t current employees. And salaried. But I know Yahoo can torture salaried employees. Maybe kill 'em, too.

You mean the ones where you could see all the email/borderline spam you are deleting? The one that only deleted what was on the current page, not some random number because they don’t use pages anymore? The one where if you marked all and scrolled down to make sure you weren’t deleting something you wanted, did NOT uncheck all the boxes? The one where you clicked a box and it was marked and clicked it again and it was unmarked? You want to go back to that ANTIQUE? That’s crazy talk!

We should be proud to use the email system that a full 25% of Yahoo employees use every day.

#17

Some of this stuff would be downright unbelievable if I didn’t know for a fact that this is the crap that yahoo expects me to believe is an upgraded mail system, not a poorly designed program written by a 5 year old who knows a little bit of Visual Basic.

#18

Agreed. The new version does such weird, crazy shit - I don’t even know how it manages it. I was working on a long email, doing deletions and stuff, and somehow the finished product that got sent out put BACK some of the things I had already deleted. WTF, man? That was the most exotic error I’ve seen - mostly it’s just been flakey as hell, with emails not actually going, and incoming emails just getting lost in the ether. Oh yeah, I hate the way my emails are sorted by threads now. Hate it.

It was just fine, until they “fixed” it. Blech.

#19

How do you know it isn’t? Has your home city been flattened by an alien saucer attack recently? No? Thank Yahoo SpamGuard.

Mind you, you would think they would be able to tell that all the stuff I get in freakin’ Chinese has to be spam!

#20

At this point, if you did not already have a yahoo account why would you ever get one with them?