Yahoo! customers! wake! up! to! borked! email! (Yes! people! still! actually! use! it!) Yahoo!, it appears, is still a thing. Unless it's Thursday morning, in which case it isn't. Those still clinging to the past, and their Yahoo! email accounts, found the service had developed a distinct wobble in the early hours of the morning before collapsing in a heap around 07:15 BST. While it has tottered back to life for …
MX lookups are very flaky for most of the European Yahoo domains, no matter what DNS resolvers you use. I've tested with OpenDNS, Google, and a number of other public responders, and they are all having trouble returning MX records for Yahoo domains. Yahoo.com doesn't seem to be a problem.
"The summers here are unbearably hot"
Yes, they are - for a few days. And then it might be raining, hailing or in extreme circumstances, snowing. And then it's hot again, then monsoon level of wet and then (like now) icy cold like we're in the middle of winter.
I swear our weather is controlled by a bank of switches with a deranged cat walking over them.
I still have an email account from Yahoo that I've had since 2000. There are a huge number of emails backed up there and I've been using it as a contact address for so long it would be a wrench to lose it entirely. There are a few useful features, spam control, archiving, folders, filters, address blocking and dummy accounts etc, so if you can ignore the security implications it's not all bad <ducks and runs>
I've still got a RocketMail account from the mid-90's which theoretically should still exist with Yahoo (Yahoo bought them to create their own webmail service just after Microsoft bought Hotmail). They promised it would never be deleted, I wonder if it's still there? Lets find out!
Flipping heck it's slow. It's about as slow as when I was on dial-up....
Ok, signed in, still waiting for it to load mail...
Awwww "Setting up your mailbox
A new mailbox is being created, as the old one has been inactive for more than 12 months." So my account is still active, but they deleted my mail. Well, maybe, still signing in...
"Server Connection Closed
Description: The server requested closed the connection before the transaction was completed."
Nope, no retro mail for me today, but they have at least kept my account, like they promised over twenty years ago.
Brilliant work there Yahoo :/
Edit "We are experiencing some technical difficulties Temporary error: 15"
My own yahoo email account dates back to before the turn of the century. I still use it as my main email address for Stuff That Matters; for other stuff I have a selection of others elsewhere for commercial junk etc). I access it via SMTP/POP/IMAP from Outlook and Thunderbird (Windows and Linux), and via webmail, and (occasionally) via the Android client, depending on my needs at any given time (and location).
Today is the first time in a very very long time that it's visibly been down serverside. Presumably when service is restored it'll run like a dog till the backlogs are sorted.
I've been trying to avoid the G thing, for the usual reasons, though I do have an account with them since the days when it was invitation-only. What other options might still be applicable (doesn't have to be free, does have to be multi-platform compatible)?
My own yahoo email account dates back to before the turn of the century. I still use it as my main email address for Stuff That Matters; for other stuff I have a selection of others elsewhere for commercial junk etc).
Originally I ended up with a Yahoo account when Yahoo bought eGroups (which had previously merged with Onelist) and I was forced to create an account (Onelist had our Festiva Owners maillist).
Had been so miffed I had to create a new account, I created an account with the name <ISP username>at<ISP>dotnet@yahoo.com. Yes, all spelled out as one long word.
"basically 2 years of credit monitoring unless you can document actual harm."
ANd as a result of all the other major breaches, pretty much the entire US population should have a lifetimes supply of free credit monitoring. The problem is, those freebies don't start when you want them to so you end up with three or four "free" credit monitoring service overlapping. Is a free year of credit monitoring of any value when you already have that from another breach?
A few years ago it had a vulnerability that let anyone using free WiFi have their Yahoo email cookies sniffed which gave the sniffer unrestricted access to their email account, I have no idea if this has ever been fixed but still to this day I get phishing emails purporting to come from people that have Yahoo email accounts, so I assume there is still easy access to hacking Yahoo email accounts. Also applies to BTInternet as they use Yahoo for their email.
BT have been telling me for 6 years that I am being transferred from BT Yahoo to BT Mail, on dates that varied on a weekly basis until they petered out. My experience of the BT Yahoo mix has been indescribably bad, and BT’s customer service is easily the worst I’ve ever suffered. Today’ s ‘temporary error code 15’ is finally the last last straw, so heave ho, out with the BT router and in with..... err...??
I think the real problem is that Yahoo might well stop working at all soon.
It's fine to have an account you use for all your crap, but it should at least be something that is going to survive for a while. For instance, the email I give to The Register is a hotmail account, and I'm reasonably certain that Microsoft is not going to die anytime soon...
I had the same problem, an old email account from the 90s which had loads of emails in it I wanted to keep, but without leaving it populated. I did this:
1. Set up the account as an IMAP account in Thunderbird.
2. Download all emails
3. Change the username for the account in Thunderbird to something completely wrong (e.g. paulf@yahoo.com becomes aapaulfaa@yahoo.com). This will prevent it accessing Yahoo's servers so it can't download any more updates.
4. Wipe the yahoo account of all emails etc.
5. With the preserved account user name changed, Thunderbird will let you add the account again with the correct user name so you can have continued IMAP access. This is much preferable to using the web interface.
6. Thunderbird will grumble when it can't access the corrupted user name of the preserved account but all the emails will be there to read off line.
Odd thing about Yahoo is they (or at least used to) charge for POP access, but IMAP access is free and always there, presumably for their App to use?
6. Thunderbird will grumble when it can't access the corrupted user name of the preserved account but all the emails will be there to read off line.
I've been trying to convince the TB developers for quite some time now to add a "Disabled Account" switch to the software, to prevent it from trying to retrieve email from dead accounts that you are keeping as-is for archival purposes. Hacking the mail-server address (one suggestion has been "0.0.0.0") fails to stop the program from trying to retrieve mail there anyway.
Yahoo provide the email service for BT. I use the associated calendar service as a backup. The web interface has been failing to render properly for a couple of weeks. You can see some elements of the page are in there somewhere. Might all be related.
Failures are so common it's not even worth investigating or reporting any more. Every so often calendar reminders just stop being sent. Just as well this is only a backup for me.
Yeah, I'm paying BT something like a tenner a month for the privilege of them farming a crap service out to an even worse one on Yahoo. Yes I know I should get rid, but I've had it more than two decades and it would take forever to tell all my contacts.
Tenner a month? Youch! You can do better, but what price convenience? I understand the inertia!
As for throwaway email addresses, it strikes me that it would not be all that expensive nor difficult to set up an inexpensive VPS and use something like mail-in-a-box on it, with an appropriately throw-away domain name. omfgscrewyou.com is still available and would be enjoyable to put on spammer's lists....
That may prove to be a project for another day, but a fun one.
This post has been deleted by its author
Why would anyone reading The Register use the free email account that comes with your broadband?
Fixed it for you.
Most of the public do not know of the problems of email migration until after they have been burned by an ISP swap, and even then are often at a loss as to what you can do. Unless you have some knowledge and are willing to pay, it comes down to who you want to be spied upon.
Easy to write off Yahoo! as a dinosaur from the past, with nobody, surely, still using their email service.
But they do the under-the-bonnet stuff for various ISPs, including (a large chunk of) btinternet.com and sky.com, probably others.
So an awful lot of people affected who didn't even know they were using Yahoo in the first place.
I couldn't care less if Yahoo! messes up for a day or two. I still have Yahoo! mailboxen, but it's mostly an address to give services I don't want to give my real (relatively peaceful) address.
What concerns me is the possibility that they pulled the plug after noticing China/Russia/America (delete as per your preferences) swiping a copy of everything.
I mean, it's not as if Yahoo! has a great track record here...
"Emails now going through OK (if slow) but any between 7am and 2pm (UK) appear to have vanished."
More detail very welcome. E.g. might that not just be the usual SMTP-failure backoff+retry mechanism, especially when combined with the backlog of a global outage, or is it something more permanent?
E.g. a mail which arrived in my yahoo.co.uk account timestamped 15:00ish (BST) purportedly sent from someone else's gmail account at 11:00ish (BST) today took rather longer than normally expected, but it did get there. Worse things have been known to happen.
Further information and well-informed speculation gratefully received.
Why wouldn't people still use Yahoo! for e-mail? It might not have all of the pretty bells and whistles of more modern providers but, for the vast majority of users, it functions exactly the same as any other e-mail provider.
Changing your e-mail provider just because your current one is old, is about as senseless as replacing your 6-month old smartphone because a newer model's been released.
Amusingly, TalkTalk don't actually use Yahoo (they use Open-Xchange) but in making their customers aware that Yahoo have an issue (most likely to deflect calls from customers complaining that they haven't received emails from Yahoo users), they've made it sound like their customers have an email issue.
Verizon moved all its FiOS customers’ email service to AOL two years ago, and I guess that means when they devoured Yahoo!, too, that all email operations got combined in some way — because I lost email service last night as well. It’s bad enough that at least one friend p’s email server started blackholing (what I thought was Verizon/AOL mail but was actually being relayed by a server with a Yahoo! IP), but this is the fourth service outage of two or more hours’ duration I’ve had in the past three months: a total service outage due to DNS borking, two limited (but critical for me) DNS snafus, including one yesterday, and now this.
I signed up with Fastmail last night.
Today when I tried to send an email from my Yahoo account, I got a message saying it would NOT send the message because it looked like spam.
There was a hyperlink in the email and I assumed that was the cause of the problem. But converting the hyperlink to 'only' text had no effect.
Was this something to do with the fact that Yahoo now keeps asking me to whitelist it on my adblocker but I refuse ?
Anyway, whitelisting Yahoo had no effect in terms of actually sending that email.
Are Yahoo trying to remove their services entirely without actually saying so ?
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