Of Yahoo Mail Annoyances

Yahoo mail as it is right now is really annoying. It tries to pretend its a desktop application (Outlook) but runs on the web. Half the time right clicking doesnt work. It wont let you make as many filters as you want. The new version is way too slow, and on occasion, crashes Firefox. And the classic version, takes its name way too seriously.

Even moving away from Yahoo mail isnt easy - in a moment of prescience, the Yahoo people have realized that providing free forwarding will make them lose people to GMail faster. So they ask you to pay for it.

I feel one of two things are the best one can do in this situation:

Option A: Move away from Yahoo mail.

1. Tell everyone that your mail address has changed and use FreePOPs, YPOPs or Mr Postman to check for the occasional mail that still comes to your Yahoo account
2. If you are using Thunderbird, you can use the WebMail extension
3. If you feel annoyed enough, you can use the method described here to automatically migrate all your Yahoo mails to Google

Option B: Pay For Yahoo mail profession

Nothing to say here - simply pay for Yahoo professional and you get access to POP and Forwarding, thus doing away with most annoyances (by letting you use Gmail or Outlook)

Option C: Pray for a Yahoo mail AIR App

An AIR app using Yahoo's mail and address book APIs would add a lot of value to users, and save us from the bad interface design decisions. This has been discussed in detail before, and it seem and app was also constructed, but it has now been taken offline. Yahoo may be blocking the construction of this app for business reasons - less annoyances with the free version means less users for the paid one. (You have to get permission from Yahoo before you build an application with their API). Lets hope they change their mind and allow it sometime in the future... In the meantime, a Silverlight one is more likely if M$ buys Yahoo...

On a side note, here's how you can register a @live.com ID if you are interested :)