i haven't had any problems with yahoo as of late by my dad sent me an e-mail that got bounced back with a real funny return message (it said yahoo.com didn't exist). They could jsut be upgrading something somewhere.

I've been having problems with Yahoo for at least 6 months. My dad told me a month ago he's having problems. Another BB I frequent had a long thread of frustrated Yahoo email users. For me and my dad, the problem revolves around the time it takes for Yahoo to retreive a page once its clicked....its very long sometimes and other times its 'normal'. It's not my DSL connection, something has changed with Yahoo mail IMO. I have gmail and hotmail accounts, but I'm hoping Yahoo gets their stuff together or I may bail on them.

I've learned to always check the spam folder before I delete them. The Yahoo filter is very effective and sometimes too effective and reroutes some good emails. I bet the emails you never received were in the trash folder by mistake.....not necessarily Yahoo's mistake.

I'm supposed to be getting daily e-mail news sent to my yahoo e-mail address from one site. The last couple of months I get about 4/5 out of 7 a week.

This is one of those "you get what you pay for" type things.

Odd. I have used Yahoo since about when they started, and I have about 10,000 messages in my mail folders there. Never lost a message either in or out, and I use it a LOT. The spam filters are very good, but sometimes you find a good message in the spam folders.

It has gotten a little bit slower lately, but never unreliable for me.

They are working on a new UI that will be way faster. Something AJAX-based I believe, with maximally intelligent screen updates.

I also have had Yahoo since three days after they started. I now have a paid email account, so I have a few extra features (retrieve email to Outlook, for instance). I have had no problems at all.

I am sure you know, but just in case, you MUST to look at your bulk mail. About 2-3 times a week, messages to me will get sorted into the junk mail account. If you don't look, you WILL lose messages. However, it sounds like you've got more being lost than that. In addition, I have never had any slowness in or out of Yahoo, except a few times where it took almost five minutes, but again, you are talking about much longer times than that.

So, it is working just fine for me, at the moment.

Like johnmeyer, I pay for Yahoo's "Premium Service," and POP-download all messages to Outlook on my local computer.
My Lost Messages problem isn't a matter of stuff going into my Yahoo "Bulk" box, because I download ALL of my messages from Yahoo (including the Bulk box) to my local computer.
And I always do look at my local-computer "Spam" box before I delete messages from it, to make sure it didn't contain any messages that were NOT spam.

Like someone else reported farther up this thread, I also have had instances where people told me that they emailed me and Yahoo bounced the message back to them... we triple-checked the address they used, and it was my correct Yahoo address. Same thing has happened in reverse a few times, where a message I sent to another Yahoo subscriber bounced back to me as undeliverable.

At least bogus bouncebacks are better than the instances where the message simply disappears into cyberspace, which is happening to me increasingly frequently with Yahoo.

I've had my Yahoo account for over 5 years, and I never had these problems (at least, not as far as I know), until a few months ago.

Funniest instance: a couple of weeks ago I was signing up for another service Yahoo offers, and after I completed the form their online message said something like "We have just sent you a confirmation e-mail that you must respond to, to complete your registration."
I never received their e-mail.

Yahoo used to be really bad at filtering out spam and malware. They even had a relatively small limit on how much garbage you could flag. That has improved tremendously so if a few legitimate e-mails end up in the trash I think it is worth it for what Yahoo is providing for free especially that they are filtering it FOR YOU.

Using your ISP e-mail account for everything is not the best alternative to "free" Yahoo I think because with Yahoo if your e-mail address becomes targeted by the scum of the earth you can simply deactivate the account and open up a new one that is in no way linked to the original one. With an ISP account if you start out with the master account and it gets hacked or targeted there is nothing an ISP is willing to do to stop it. This happened to me few years ago. I had to open up a brand new master account and change the original name I really wanted to use for the account to something else. What I ended up doing this time was not using the master account for the name, but rather one of the five sub-accounts instead. I use my Yahoo account for most things so that the spambots won't pick up on the ISP account as soon.

Moreover, the last thing in the world I would use for e-mail is Outlook. Look at the number of times Microsoft has had to update Windows to deal with the hacking of Outlook in the past. Unfortunately, some software "requires" Outlook to function. That is one of the things I don't like about the industry. PDA's are guilty of this as well.

So far Yahoo has been doing a really good job filtering out garbage FOR me so I can't complain. The only thing I don't like is that fixed cookies are mandatory. Yahoo basically requires Trusted Site permissions. That makes me a little suspicious of their intentions. I flush them after every Yahoo session.

John

Very timely... I just got an example of exactly what I'm talking about.
A message was sent to me more than 4 days ago, and Yahoo's mail server never processed it, so it was returned to the sender along with the following message (BTW, my email address, referred to in the non-delivery message, is CORRECT, so the problem isn't that the message was misaddressed, it was that Yahoo failed to handle it.
Here's the error message the sender received:
----------
Most likely there is a network problem that prevented delivery, but
it is also possible that the computer is turned off, or does not
have a mail system running right now.

Your message was not delivered within 4 days and 0 hours.
Host yahoo.com is not responding.

The following recipients did not receive this message:

<ernietamminga@yahoo.com>

Please reply to <Postmaster@cox.net>
if you feel this message to be in error.

------------

It would appear that no one is interested in gmail. I have no problems with it and don't know how I made it without the search feature that it offers.

Again, if anybody wants a gmail account, I have plenty to share and no one to share them with as I have given to all the people that I could think of giving one to.

j razz

that's the exact same responce my dad got. Has anyone forwarded this to Yahoo to see what they say about it?

I have e-mailed Yahoo about the problem but (based on past experience with problem reports, anyway) I don't really expect them to provide clear info in response.

If they DO, though, I'll pass it on here...

Thanks, jrazz, about the gmail offer---my preference for the moment would be NOT to change my email address that LOTS of people have for me, since I've been using it for over 5 years. But if Yahoo reliability continues to slide, I will be looking around for an alternative.

You may want to look at other possibilites, my Yahoo mailbox has been rock steady with very heavy use.

Are you using the old interface or the new (that's in beta)?

I haven't made any changes to my Yahoo account in several years...
I pay for their "Premium" service, and don't use any fancy options (if there are any...).

My service seemed rock-steady for years, too... these delays and failed deliveries only started (far as I know) within the past several months. A few other folks I know who use Yahoo are also experiencing the problem -- I only know that because I've sent messages to one or another of them and the message gets bounced back to me as undeliverable -- not always, but often enough to undermine my confidence in the service.
The undeliverable-message notification that says "server yahoo.com failed to respond" seems pretty unambiguous in indicating that it is, indeed, a Yahoo problem.

Every email provider has issues from time to time. My Gmail recently went berserk and would show messages as sent but they really did not go. During that same time, it would not rcv replies from messages that had gone out. The one consistent problem I had with Yahoo! was an error that said "there is a problem accessing your account" etc ..... emailing them (Yahoo!) only generated an automated response. With a bit of time it worked itself out.

In case anyone's interested in Yahoo's response to my inquiry, it's pasted in below. I did visit the Help page that they gave the link for, and that page gives several sets of circumstances that can cause mail delays or bouncebacks. None of those circumstance-sets matches my cases of bounceback or delay, though. The bounceback messages that I receive (and the ones that people have told me about when their messages to me fail to get through) explicitly say that the yahoo.com mail server has, for over 4 days, failed to respond.
I'm starting to make it a habit to use the "Request read receipt" option in Outlook Express, to have some confidence my messages to Yahoo users are getting through. (That's not a 100% solution, of course, because a recipient can always specify NOT to have a read-receipt sent...)
Anyway, here's Yahoo's techsupport message:
------------------
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Mail Plus Customer Care.

We are sorry to hear about the issue you have experienced. We have
checked our servers and our mail systems appear to be working at the
moment. The issue may have been transient or network related.

If the issue persists, the best solution is to have the mail system
administrator or postmaster of the internet service provider or domain,
with which you are experiencing the issue, contact us directly via the
Yahoo! Mail Help page below in order to investigate the issue in further
details.

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-03.html

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

The last few days, I've started to have outgoing mail rejected (I have the advance Yahoo mail that lets me send mail through Yahoo from Outlook). Usually, if I open the mail (which is now sitting in my Out Basket) and click on Send again, it goes through the next time. This is happening about 20% of the time, and is definitely new behavior in the past ten days.

******Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Mail Plus Customer Care.

We are sorry to hear about the issue you have experienced. We have
checked our servers and our mail systems appear to be working at the
moment. The issue may have been transient or network related.

If the issue persists, the best solution is to have the mail system
administrator or postmaster of the internet service provider or domain,
with which you are experiencing the issue, contact us directly via the
Yahoo! Mail Help page below in order to investigate the issue in further
details.



http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-03.html

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.
Message last edited on 3/14/2006 5:04:59 PM, by earthrisers.******


Looks like Yahoo is blowin' smoke up the Wahoo