Yahoo is currently identified through its giant portal but the company owns an impressive number of Internet services. Let's take for example Yahoo Mail, one of the oldest products designed by the company with millions of users in the entire world. At this time, the service remains very attracting mostly because it is regarded as a well-developed product with powerful functions. As you probably know, Yahoo Messenger, the most popular instant messaging client, requires a username and password that can be the same as your Yahoo mail account.

The rivalry between Google and Yahoo is very important especially for the Internet users because it can cause only an improved performance of the products designed by the two companies. Although the rivalry concerns the search technologies they provide, both firms are also trying to update their mail solution to become the most efficient on the Internet. Recently, Google made the beta version of the Gmail available for free because the service required an invitation since its release date in the year 2004.

It seems like Yahoo Mail is not so well-updated because the solution returns a lot of errors when a user tries to check his accounts. Let me explain what happens: today, while I was reading my messages on Yahoo's product, I clicked on the Inbox button and the service returned me an error. I logged out and signed in again and the mail solution gave me the same message. It seems like the problems appeared some days ago when other users reported they encountered problems with Yahoo Mail.

Under the title "Sorry for the inconvenience" the error displays the following message: "You've stumbled upon a temporary problem we're having with Yahoo! Mail. Usually this problem gets resolved quickly, without you doing a thing. In fact it may be taken care of now. Try pressing the Reload or Refresh button on your browser, or logging out than back into your Yahoo! account. Hopefully that will take care of things. If that doesn't fix the problem, please be patient while we sort it out and try again shortly. The fact that you're reading this page means we've been automatically notified of the issue, and chances are we're working on it now."

Personally, the only solution I can see is to migrate to another mail service that can allow me to read messages ANYTIME without headaches, errors or refreshes. So, is Gmail the only alternative for a web-based e-mail account?