The only e-mail accounts I have are with yahoo and gmail. I use one of the yahoo accounts more frequently, but I made the mistake of allowing the other yahoo account to “upgrade” (emphasis on the scare quotes), and now I hate that damn thing.
If I could roll it back to the earlier version, I surely would. Luckily it’s not that relevant to me, account-wise, the address I didn’t let upgrade is far more important to me and it still works fine.
And I really hope they don’t go down the drain anytime soon because that would really, really screw up a lot of my e-mail choices over the years. Could someone superstitious please knock on some wood for me, thank you?
They’re (somehow) too famous to just go quietly into the night A far worse fate awaits a dying Yahoo: They’ll probably be purchased by Microsoft and turned into the next Hotmail/Live/OneDrive/Outlook/whatever. You’ll get to keep the email address, I would bet, but have to live with ten interface changes a year.
Side story: Back in 2002 or so, I attended a Yahoo focus group at their HQ. It was just me and a few curious researchers. The entire research consisted of me looking at a picture of their homepage, and comparing it to a picture of Google’s home page and telling them why I liked Google better. So they were aware of the impending demise even back then. God only knows how they’ve managed to hang on for another decade, pimping themselves out to Google and then Bing. I guess they just have a bunch of die-hard users who don’t bother switching, i.e. the AOL business model. As long as AOL is still around, Yahoo probably will be too
Yahoo has changed their policies. In order to open a yahoo account now, you MUST provide a mobile phone number capable of receiving texts. No exceptions. If you google it, you might find some old posts from people claiming to have found a way around this, but yahoo is closing them all down. It used to be possible to open a yahoo account with a gmail or facebook login, not any more. It used to be possible to go through some portal in a foreign country, not any more. It even weeds out google voice and virtual texting somehow.
If you want a throwaway yahoo account now days, you have to buy a throwaway mobile phone to go with it.
A few months ago they were screwing around with upgrades and it was almost unusable. But it is okay now. I never get Yahoo spam and their spam filter is about 99.9% effective.
But I’d use gmail for job stuff, though the only contact I’ve had on that front was from Google . At least Yahoo allows you to turn off threads.
They have some board with complaints, and the Mail one was massive back when they were having problems. I think there might have been a thread about it back then.
Have you ever seen Sonntek’s website? It looks like someone built it in 1996 and hasn’t updated it since. They even use an AOL address for their email address.
I hate it, but I hate gmail even more. I’ve had it for so long that I can’t really get rid of it, even if gmail is “cooler”. When google goes the way of MySpace, then all the cool kids will switch then. Not worth it. If it makes me look like a dork, so be it. I’m not afraid of change, but it’s just not worth it, even if I don’t like it.
It’s been so slow and buggy and the above-mentioned IM box opening up is crazy annoying. I’ve had calendar fuck ups too.
And I find gmail harder to use and loses my emails all the time. I’ve changed ISPs too often to really stick with one of them. So yahoo it stays for as long as I can.
I didn’t know the POP3 was free now. I might have to load it in outlook or thunderbird to change things up, see if that works better than web-based. It does work better on my mobile device than on my computer or other computers/browsers.
Hotmail used to be my primary email account, until they changed it so that the most recent emails are on top, so I can’t read my mail in chronological order. You can change it so that it’s in the order you want it to be, but after having read ONE message, it switches back again. I dumped Hotmail but still use the account for long-used, old addressing. Even when they switched it to Outlook, it still sucks.
So I switched to Yahoo mail and have used it as my primary account for years now. And it’s still worth having. There are occasional problems, but not nearly anything people are reporting. And I have NEVER received any kind of spam from Yahoo.
I have a Gmail account, but I never use it or even go there. It’s just full of spam.
It was actually a good comment and one to consider.
If someone sent me an interview with an AOL address, I’d expect them to be old, and possibly responsible for all the right wing, crazy uncle emails.
I’d like Yahoo to succeed. It just seems crazy the issues I get with it. I mean, if I were Yahoo, I’d make damn sure that mail was 100% perfect, seeing as mail is the public face of Yahoo for many. Yet it’s been about 2 years with weird issues.
