Sorry, but welcome to technology. Gmail has been sporadic for me. Firefox crashes periodically on this machine, but not my box at home. I've bought games that I can NEVER get to work on any computer. When I plug in my iPhone via USB, Photoshop opens. Back when I actually worked at a big company, the Exchange server acted up from time to time. Google Analytics just admitted to losing some data, but they think they can recover it. Amazon was down for a big swath of time recently.

Yahoo being down for a single morning is not news, and should not come as a surprise- serving up email at that volume is complex. It being down frequently is another story. Is it?

I'm sure if you ever spin up a startup, your first technology catastrophe and resultant unscheduled downtime will cure you of your desire to see an angry mob when stuff like this happens.

Or, he could just have his company switch to Google Apps.

Google Apps has had outages, too. It won't change anything. Everything has outages. The difference -- if there is one -- might be in an SLA that might give you some money back if there is an outage. I have no idea what the terms are for Google Apps vs. Yahoo! Email.... I'm just sayin', everything goes down eventually...

You said the magic letters - SLA. This is why some companies pay big bucks for outsourced email. They guarantee a % uptime and if the provider doesn't meet it, I believe that you have legal grounds to sue for damages and disruption to business.

Honestly, if email is _that_ critical to you, you're going to have to pay for it.

They usually offer a money-back guarantee if they fail to meet the % uptime, but I don't know of any provider who would absolutely guarantee uptime and risk a lawsuit for not complying. I'm curious to know if there are some like that.

I was implying that Yahoo mail sucks, regardless of the outages.

Does google apps have outages? I haven't experienced one in 6 months.

Wrong choice of words; I don’t think you must use such language to express your frustration.

I agree with you Yahoo mail service is bad I switched service a while ago and will stay far from it as long as possible.

I believe the answer to this choice of words comes from pg's essay on what we tell kids. It's inappropriate. Especially as a headline.

I thought it was humorous. Sometimes you have to express your raw feelings with crude words :)

If I could upmod you 10x, I would sir. Must be a lot of O'Reilly fans here.

It's just a fucking word.

"Such" language? How do you mean? Is the particular F U C K constellation of letters somehow objectively worse than, say, F U D G E or F R E A K? He made a "wrong choice"? You understood his point, yes? He got it across efficiently, yes? Seems to me he expressed himself perfectly fluently.

Words aren't just "constellations" of letters. This is a silly idea. Not only is it a poor excuse for using profanity, but it also takes the power out of taboo words.

greendestiny explained it well here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=188634

What is the right choice? Please write out your equivalent of "Yahoo Mail fucking sucks" and we'll see if it conveys the same emotion and frustration in a similarly pointed fashion.

Hey You, have a problem with Yahoo! talk to them. What on earth could one of us help you fix a problem at yahoo data center? Let alone cursing.

What happened to this site?

its probably not news because its known to be a sub-par product, with sub-par customer service.

newsflash: dog bites man, sky is blue, yahoo mail is crappy. news at 10 for full stories.

i suggest using this downtime as a foil to convince someone to bite the bullet and switch to gmail or something else.

Yahoo mail hasn't been down once for me today. I think the "outage" isn't as wide spread as you think. Have you checked your firewall?

Me neither. Come to think of it, I don't remember the last time Yahoo mail was down. Are commercial email accounts treated differently?

I don't understand why the parent post is downvoted to -6.

His code tag makes the page super super wide.

And that's his fault?

Setting a CSS width and overflow-x:scroll on code blocks would fix the problem quickly.

FWIW, Yahoo mail was a little slow for me but worked. I have had success with them overall.

I switched to Yahoo as my host from an inexpensive provider because of a bad experience I had with shared hosting. I was apparently sharing a server with a very bad spammer, and got my email blocked by Comcast. Not a small part of the market (and owner of my personal email, for that matter).

When I called for help, other provider said they're talking to Comcast but being more or less ignored, and that it was ultimately my problem to get Comcast to let my mail pass.

Uh, no.

Now, if that happens again I have the power of Yahoo to put pressure on Comcast (or whatever) to let my mail pass.

As for a host, I'm disappointed by the lack of tools (latest php, latest mySQL, python, etc), available.

But I've been a desktop app guy, so it hasn't hit me yet. However, my latest market survey is indicating my model may need to change a bit.

I know the squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that; but shouldn't you be complaining to Yahoo, instead of us?

I have been having problems with my paid Yahoo account for months now. Can't search my own email. I call support, they reset the settings, it's fixed for a day or two, then it breaks... hit repeat. And all these new error codes. When did Yahoo mail ever need an error code?! Garbage!

Absolutely Yahoo Mail sucks ... and big time!! For about the past 48 hours, I haven't been able to get my (Yahoo Mail) email there. It's March 9th 2009 as I compose this...

This small box (blue background...white text) appears and says Loading...

And nothing happens! Using Yahoo Mail help is a complete waste of time! Why doesn't somebody at Yahoo get their head out of that place where the sun doesn't shine and fix this problem??? It's perfectly obvious that the problem is with Yahoo Mail...

I used it for a week or two earlier this year - even when it was up it could take a couple of hours for a message to be delivered. I don't use it any more.

Webmail is definitely interesting. In fact, news all over the net today are about webmail/webmail tools (Xoopit/Zenbe).

By the way, welcome to the Internet. http://www.veryfunnyads.com/index.html?id=25575

Yahoo Mail is based on Oddpost, which is the granddaddy of sweet AJAX web 2.0 apps. Not only is Oddpost not far removed from today's web apps, it's generally a key source of inspiration for many of the AJAX techniques used today.