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...

