Why does anyone use Yahoo email???

A word of advice for anyone using Yahoo mail:

Use Googlemail

Last night, I had to test the formatting of an email generated by our Email Marketing tool within Yahoo mail.

  • The first email I sent arrived immediately
  • The second email I sent did not arrive within an hour and a half
  • The third email I sent (20 minutes later) also did not arrive within that time frame
  • The fourth email I sent (over an hour later) arrived imediately

When I checked yahoo mail this morning, there were four unread emails - including one which had been sent at 16:30 the previous day - this mail took at least 8 hours to arrive!

This in itself should be more than enough to stop anyone using yahoo mail (This is definitely not an isolated instance, we have had several reports of this behaviour from our clients).

In addition, the following would also stop me using yahoo:

  • Extremely intrusive advertising, often taking over ~ 50% of the screen space.
  • The annoying this message was sent using yahoo mail - aren't we fantastic! message which yahoo seem to put into every outgoing email by default
  • When you set up a new account, Yahoo seem to "opt you in" to receive messages within various categories - without warning you that they are going to

Now I appreciate that some people don't get on with the googlemail interface - but if my 60+ year old mum can can cope with moving from yahoo to google (and actually prefers the googlemail interface) - then it can't be that hard!

Add on the fact that you can host email for your own domains there for free - and you get a whole lot of other functionality for free as well (Blackberry / mobile device / POP3 / IMAP access, integration with other Google services etc.) - and the advertising is non intrusive (and often relevant) - then I really can't understand why anyone would use a service which is as dysfunctional and annoying as yahoo's...

Rant over... for now...

How to find the user / entity an email address is associated with in Exchange 2003

MS Exchange stores the email addresses for all users and other entities within the Active Directory.

It is very easy to add an email address to a User (Email Addresses tab on the properties page for an Exchange Enabled user) or to a public folder (Exchange System Manager > #Organisation# > Administrative Groups > #Administrative Group# > Folders > Public Folders : Select folder, right click > All Tasks > Mail Enable : Select Folder > Properties > Email Addresses) (O.K. easy when you know where to go).

Multiple email addresses can be added for a user or folder - but its very hard to see which email addresses have been assigned to which entity - especially as there are 2 different management consoles dependant on the type of entity, and secondary email addresses are not easily visible without opening the enity that contains them.

If you attempt to assign an email address which is already assigned to another entity, you get the following error message:

This email address aready exists in this organization.

ID no: XXXXXXX Exchange System Manager

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Outlook 2003 / Exchange Multipart Email Gotcha

We use Exchange 2003 internally, together with Outlook 2003 as an email client.

Outlook does not handle multipart emails correctly - any attempt to preview the plain text version of the email results in showing a conversion of the HTML version into plain text, rather than the text/plain alternative.

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