What is wrong with my Yahoo Mail account?

This problem has happened to me a few times now, and it’s really starting to get annoying. I’m hoping somebody here is familiar with it (and that I’m not the only one who has it).

Background info: I used to be with an ISP (best.com) which was bought by Verio. Verio contracted their email service out to Earthlink, so theoretically I have an Earthlink email account. I say “theoretically” because when I access my account at home I use my Verio password, not my Earthlink password. I have my own domain and nobody knows my Earthlink address.

I work at a company that doesn’t allow employees direct access to POP3 accounts for security reasons, so I set up a Yahoo Mail Plus account so I can access my POP3 account indirectly. I found it so convenient that I use it all the time now, even at home (replacing my former mail reader, Nescape 4.7).

Recently, I’ve been having a problem in Yahoo where I receive multiple copies of the same (spam) email messages–like 10 or 12 of each at a stretch. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to which ones I get, so I don’t think they’re related. However, sometimes after deleting a bunch of these, I go to retrieve mail again and the application chugs along for awhile and tells me “page not found”. If I access my Inbox directly, all the same multi-spam messages are back, but no other new email is there. When this problem occurs there is no way for me to receive new email in Yahoo.

The only way I’ve found to fix the problem is to go home, fire up Netscape, connect directly, and download my email (removing it from the server, which I really don’t want to do because I want it to be accessible in Yahoo). When I do this there is always more email, meaning I did actually have some waiting while Yahoo attempted unsuccessfully to retrieve it.

I joke that my Yahoo account gets constipated and I need to go home and give it an enema to get things flowing again, but I’m rapidly getting out of the joking mood. This is happening more frequently than it used to (used to be once every 6 months or so–now it’s been once every 2-3 weeks).

Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this and how to fix it? I figured I’d try first before I braved the uncharted waters of Yahoo support. Thanks.

Just to clarify, are you talking about your POP3 email here, or your Yahoo account email?

I’m talking about my POP3 account email retrieved through the Yahoo interface (the “check other mail” option where you configure it to retrieve from your POP3 account–only available through the Yahoo Plus (paid) account).

What email program are you using? Have you tried another email program, temporarily, to determine if the problem is with Yahoo or with your current email program?

As I said, when I retrieve mail at home with my Netscape application, everything works fine. I can’t use anything else to retrieve here at work (unless I go configure some other web-based thing that lets me access my POP3 from here, which I’d really rather not do), but the fact that Netscape works suggests to me that Yahoo is the problem.

Sorry to reply to my own posting, but I just got another data point: when I send mail to myself at my Yahoo address (the original address on the Yahoo account, which I normally never use) it gets through just fine. It’s only email to my domain-based address that doesn’t get through.

I can’t help with the problem, but to clarify: I believe the OP is using Yahoo! as a mail client. Yahoo! Mail has the ability to connect to an external POP3 server and retrieve (import) mail. It essentially acts as a web-based POP3 client (mail reader).