I just browsed my Yahoo spam folder and found an email purporting to be from an ex-work colleague. It was sent to a bunch of other ex-colleagues as well and contained a link to what looked like a site for selling fake ED pills.
I replied to the colleague to say, “Hey looks like you’ve been hacked! Ha ha ha”, and was told by Yahoo:
Your message was not sent
Your account has been temporarily blocked from sending messages. This block can be caused by sending messages that trigger our spam filters, or by having too many recipients in one email. We encourage you to review the contents and recipient list of your message, and try sending it at after an hour or two. Doing so will usually resolve the matter.
If you are still unable to send messages after a 24-hour period, please read our FAQ for more information and to request Customer Care assistance.
We apologise for the inconvenience.
Thanks,
The Yahoo! Mail Team
Thanks for apologising for locking my account, assholes.
“If you are still unable to send messages after a 24-hour period …”? Well, I don’t think I’ll bother with your “Customer Care assistance” as it has done me fuck-all good in the past. I think I’ll just make that switch to a less irritating email provider that I’ve been thinking about for the past ten years.
The Oracle Sponge 
For years, the only reason I had a yahoo mail account was that was where sdoug was. Every few months, my password would expire, I always assumed it was typical VMS mail “feature.” The yahoo provided recovery features would never work, I’d complain, nothing would happen, then mysteriously it would start working again. Then a number of years passed when it didn’t work, I was still getting sdoug newsletters, but couldn’t do anything about it (and didn’t particularly care). Then flickr became part of the muck, and I had to go through it all over again several times with several accounts – and that original account started working again with the old password. I just hate giving them any money (for flickr pro), but what else would be any better? It’s effectively my offsite storage for thousands of pix.
Possibly a bit late but I would recommend Fastmail (www.fastmail.fm). It is a paid for service (although there are basic free accounts) but then perhaps you get what you pay for? I’ve been using it for a couple of years now and it’s always been reliable and they have a good support blog and a forum as well.
idiot’s new yahoo
idiot’s new yahoo mail