

Yahoo Mail circling the drain? - 205guy

I've commented several times on HN how the web needs a revenue model that's not spammy or scammy, and I always mention I'm glad to pay Yahoo $20/year for their Yahoo Plus mail. I get a decent mail service, I don't see any ads on it, it works with my iPhone, and I don't think they're as savvy as Google about collecting all my data.<p>So of course, just yesterday, they disappeared my wife's Yahoo Plus account. It started with an error message about the account being deactivated due to user request or inactivity, she was then taken to a screen to re-activate the account and than taken to a freshly initialized mail account. All her emails and folders are gone, the only thing left is a "Welcome to Yahoo" message. This is the email account that she uses every day, where her business emails are forwarded, where she stores her archives, and which is not due for renewal for another 6 months. What makes me think it's some form of error is that her 400+ contacts are unaffected.<p>And that's when we found out Yahoo has no customer service. She filed an incident ticket, they told her to call account verification, and after 30 minutes on hold, they said they couldn't help, but to reopen the ticket. In the meantime, the emails to and from support are disappearing from the "new" account.<p>Forums and social media are full of user complains about deactivated yahoo mail accounts, and some users claim to have lost their contacts as well. There is a group discussing this problem at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Y-Mail/<p>But I don't see any media stories about this. Yahoo is all over the news with their new CEO trying to turn things around, but their mail service that was rock solid for 15 years just gave up the ghost and their technical support is out to lunch. So, is anybody else having issues with it, or are we just the last people using Yahoo mail?
======
olefoo
If you want to know pain, buy a domain or two from Yahoo! you will discover
that it's worse than GoDaddy as a registrar.

But yeah, if you're a paying customer you should at the very least be able to
get someone on the phone in the event of a major malfunction.

------
205guy
Thanks for confirming what I thought. In the meantime, my wife got on as many
Yahoo groups and FB pages as she could to comiserate with others having
similar problems. Then she started posting all their customer service phone
numbers (which you can't find on their website, only once they reply to a
ticket) and 2 things happened:

\- Yahoo fixed her email account. \- Yahoo removed her comments.

Gaah, I so wanted to defend Yahoo and just get email I can trust for a good
price. Everyone loves an underdog, except when they're just a dog.

------
booruguru
You should a write a detailed blog post about your experience and try to make
it go viral. (I'm good at that sort of thing and I'd be more than willing to
help.) I can't stand it when multi-billion dollar companies fail to offer
meaningful support for paid services. This kind of story makes me so angry.

------
tn13
I had purchased Yahoo Small Business hosting and that also came up some domain
name. Now I wanted to park some domain names and their customer support had no
idea what parked domains meant.

------
thoughtcriminal
I bailed from Yahoo email, hosting, everything about 5 years ago. Their email
was one of their best products. That along with Flickr. But Yahoo as a
registrar and hosting service were amateur hour, and the news stories on the
Yahoo page were so disgusting and sensationalistic I had to escape.

I look back now and I'm amazed I stuck with them as long as I did.

------
notdrunkatall
Yahoo mail's been circling the drain for years. I switched from Yahoo mail to
gmail about five years ago and haven't looked back since.

