Yahoo is a very popular website in India. It started with a bang and they facilitated us by providing a mail service called Yahoo Mail. Their mail service is one of the oldest in India I think. But after so many years, did it serve me pretty well? Lets find out.
I made my yahoo mail id several years ago. Registration was a no nonsense standard affair and I could successfully create the id without any problem. Since then(nearly about for 11-12 years) I have been using it. In my office, we have our official e-mail id in yahoo. And usually I myself send most of the mails of my office. Now a days, my experience with yahoo mail is horrible. We have BSNL Corporate connectivity in our office. I dont know whether many of the flaws of yahoo are caused by the pathetic BSNL connection or not, but yahoo itself has degraded their mail service over the years.
Mail interface is good. We have as usual a inbox, draft, contacts etc. The color themes can be changed and they are soothing for day to day use. U can create some customisable folders and put some specific mails in them so as to find them later quickly. U can create Contact Groups to send mails easily. Spam filters work well. Settings menu has some tweak options. But alas! I think all the good things end here. Rest of my experience is not at all pleasant. And all the features I mentioned are also present in other popular mail services too like GMail, Rediff Mail etc so these are not at all exclusive to yahoo.
Its’old view’ was very good. I faced too few problems with it. But unfortunately they have created a ’new view/look’ of the mailbox and the problem started from there. It is now a ’conversation view’ like smartphones but the implementation is not that sophisticated. Many a times it can not load all the mails properly, sometimes it simply refuses to show the attachments of some mails(not all). All these faults are repetitive in nature and they are very irritating.
Even in some mails that I have sent earlier and opened thereafter, the texts got scrambled. When sending e-mails, sometimes the ’compose button’ does not work at all.
Attachments, particularly having size more than 1 mb take ages to attach. Some PDF files of size more than 2 mb completely failed to attach themselves often.
While composing a mail, if u copy-paste it from MS-Word, most of the formatting will be gone. Line spacing gets increased, some font style change in their own and so on.
Printing is another headache! While printing inbox or sent mails, it always reserves a large amount of space across the right border. If the mail is large, u have to make print preview size equal to or less than 50-60%, otherwise it can not print all the words or letters of the lines. And in those above preview percentage, the printed texts came out very small. So u have to suffer whichever way u go.
Last but not the least, very recently the page loading time has increased significantly compared to Gmail in specific. Sometimes it does not load at all.
Some serious changes are required in Yahoo mail in order to compete with GMail. If Yahoo R&D team does not take initiatives now, they will surely lose some registered users in near future. Many of u may differ from my experience, but in true sense, yahoo needs an overhaul change I think, so as to be competitive in the market.