14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo Mail is having so many issues that the company should really feel embarrassed by now.
It’s not like the service went without a hitch before the new version was rolled out last year, but the downtimes seemed to at least happen a lot more rarely.
Ever since the new Yahoo Mail was introduced, users have hated it. In the beginning, it was the way it looked – with the missing tabs and the fact that you had to close one email to open another, losing track of whatever else you were doing as you browsed through the hundreds of emails you received.
Since most heavy users also had a bunch of folders created specifically to be able to easily keep track of the incoming messages, the fact that the numbers attached to each of them were hidden did not bode well for yet another group.
Eventually, Yahoo switched some things to accommodate users by reintroducing the tabbed view, which you can activate quite easily from the interface, and made all folders visible, complete with the bracketed email count.
But this process took months for Yahoo and during this time, there were a few roundabout ways to obtain the old Yahoo mail that involved a simple browser extension that emulated an old Internet Explorer version. For months on end, users bypassed the new version with this trick, but Yahoo wised up and ruined everyone’s fun.
Nearly every day, I receive another comment on one of these old how-to articles complaining about the fact that Yahoo is no longer allowing users to employ the workaround.
Even more often, however, I get messages about how bad Yahoo’s customer service is. Dozens of people have told me thus far that they want to quit using Yahoo Mail for many reasons.
Firstly, Yahoo Mail’s uptime is peppered with problems a lot more often than it should. While these may not be widespread, Twitter is full of people asking if the Yahoo service is down for anyone else at almost any given time.
Even when users can connect to Yahoo Mail, they most often have various problems with the interface, whether that means having to resend an email or to refresh the page since the buttons won’t work. There’s also a pretty big delay between the moment you send an email and the time the message is received.
You can easily try this out by sending a message between two of your accounts. Yahoo to Gmail will work relatively Ok, but if you try sending a message towards a corporate address, you’re in for a lengthy wait. These things shouldn’t happen.
Even stories such as these seem like nothing compared to the horrors so many people go through. Following the massive crash of last year when Yahoo Mail went out for several days for a large portion of users, the number of people complaining about the fact that they can no longer log into their accounts has grown.
It’s not just regular users who complain, but business users too – people who rely on Yahoo Mail when trying to make a living. Being unable to rely on your email service for your day to day activities is something very serious.
And this is frustrating for most loyal users, since Yahoo used to be such a reliable product. If you had started using Yahoo Mail at the beginning of this year, you'd have quit by now after giving the tool way too many chances already.
Why does this happen? Because Yahoo seems to be spreading itself thin. The company is expanding into new areas, trying to take on YouTube, trying to be the next big news site, launching magazines, apps, buying more and more startups.
In the meantime, Yahoo search is barely used anymore and the Mail service has problems so often that people are running away from it. To make matters worse, customer support is basically inexistent since most people who try to reach the company complain about not being able to get anyone on the phone.
That being said, perhaps Yahoo should go back to its roots and remember that it has a few core products that it needs to take care of before picking yet another area to be mediocre in, because, let’s face it, Yahoo will never manage to overtake YouTube, Netflix or any other similar video streaming service, no matter how hard it tries.