We hate to pile on to Yahoo, what with Microsoft making its unwanted advances. But a recent near-death experience with Yahoo Mail deserves some comment.
Like many other cubicle dwellers saddled with slow-poke corporate Microsoft Outlook email, we regularly forward our regular work mail to an outside account. Yahoo Mail has been our choice, liking as we do its clean, Outlook-like interface. We happily even pay $19.99 a year for the “Plus” version service. And since last summer, it’s offered unlimited storage (”Never delete another email!” it said), which we considered icing on the cake.
Last week, our email suddenly stopped working. Whenever we tried to log on, we got a “LaunchCascadeError-ymws:Server.MailboxOpenFailed” error message. Not only was that inconvenient and annoying, but it was also worrisome, since it suggested Yahoo might not be following the suggested “best practices” of security experts. (Web applications are supposed to “fail gracefully” without disgorging specific messages about their internal states, which can provide valuable clues to hackers.)
Invoking certain mainstream media prerogatives, we sent a sternly worded email to Yahoo’s PR department. After a day or two, our Yahoo Mail was back. Sort of. The inbox only showed a thousand or so messages, all from the last month or so, rather then several years worth of more than 55,000 emails in all. (Taking Yahoo’s “unlimited storage” promise at face value, we use the account as a permanent archive.) Further email exchanges with Yahoo revealed that the 54,000 other messages weren’t exactly lost–they were just invisible. The company says it will need six or eight hours to get them back, during which time we can’t log in, lest we run the risk of losing everything.
So what happened exactly? Turns out Yahoo isn’t really prepared for users doing what we do–namely keeping all their mail in a single inbox–as opposed to moving them into sub-folders. (We don’t spend any time sorting because doing so defeats the whole purpose of having a single back-up email system that doesn’t require any thought or tending.) When the number of emails in a single folder gets too big, a Yahoo Mail account crashes and burns. Yahoo was apologetic, of course, and at least didn’t try to blame the victim (us) for causing the problem — getting too many emails in the first place. Says Mail’s John Kremer, “You’re using the product exactly how we want it used.”
Still, a fix is a month or so away, says the company. That means our inbox may become Microsoft’s problem.
courtesy:wsj
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