Last month, Yahoo finally killed Yahoo Mail Classic, about six months after launching a major redesign for Yahoo Mail. During most of the first half of the year, users still had the option to use the old version, but starting the week of June 3rd, older versions went away, forcing users to use the redesigned experience.
No big deal right? Companies redesign their products all the time. Usually it’s for the better, and the inevitable complaints from users who don’t like change die down after a short time. Well, this time, the complaints have been fast and steady, and are still going strong over a month after Yahoo made the final switch. A lot of users really just don’t seem to be happy.
Do you use Yahoo Mail? Do you like or dislike the new version? Do you miss Yahoo Mail Classic? Let us know in the comments.
It was quite evident right when Yahoo pulled the plug on Yahoo Mail Classic that some were pretty displeased. We even felt it necessary to write about this back then because there were just so many complaints. An article about this we ran in the WebProNews newsletter still continues to get search traffic on a daily basis, accompanied by more and and more complaints in the comments.
Let’s look at a few examples:
“I loved it now I hate it. I cannot do any of the things I did before the middle of June 2013. When I reply I cannot use the spell ck the bold etc. I cannot edit something to forward it as I could before or just send a reply without all the previous conversations. If it does not get back to normal or better I will be forced to get rid of it which I hate as all my friends and companies have my e mail address. Who ever was the brain that changed something that was working well needs to be fired. Next time ask people if they would like the change. I guess because it is free one cannot complain so my next step is to move on. I hope Yahoo gets the message. AOL seems to be the best next default mail. Also it seems to be one long e mail of all the sent and resent things so if you want to keep some of it guess what you have to keep all of it pics etc.”
…
“I think the new Yahoo webmail is atrocious, it’s a crime to force people to use such a piece of junk. It’s slow, ignores clicks, seems to repeat clicks and delete items you were expecting to delete. In terms of design, it’s awful. The size of emails is no longer on the main list, so you can’t defer opening large emails until later. You cannot adjust the size of columns. The folder list rolls off when you scroll the email list. You cannot easily delete multiple emails from the main list at once — you have to go one by one…
…
“I’ve been having problems with my Yahoo e-mail ever since I switched over from classic. The biggest problem is that the e-mails don’t load correctly when I click on them, leaving a blank screen, and requiring me to close the message, and click on it again, and again, and again; in order to get the message to load. Often, after multiple attempts, I have to refresh the whole page and start over just to finally get the message to load.”
“Also, though there is a supposed procedure available for users to opt-out of receiving ads; when I tried to opt-out of all advertising, it did not work correctly, and gave me a message something like: You have successfully opted out of receiving ads from 84 providers, but the process failed with these 16 companies”
“The same thing happened with the Ad Partners opt-out… And so, even though I took the time to opt-out, I am still bombarded with annoying ads; and further, I don’t know what content in my e-mails they are scanning, but the ads are totally irrelevant to me, dating services (I’m married), credit scores (not interested), criminal background checks (I’m not hiring at this time), English lessons (LOL), the list of irrelevant ads goes on and on.”
“Yet even though I receive literally hundreds of e-mails per day from my horse racing website (clockerscorner.com), I have not seen one single horse racing related ad, EVER; which leads me to believe that in fact, Yahoo isn’t attempting to send me ads which are relevant to me (although it sounds good), but instead, Yahoo is just bombarding me with ads from whichever advertisers they have available at the time.”
“For all of the above reasons, I think the time has come to abandon my Yahoo account. The problem is that I have been using it for about nine years, and I have messages being forwarded to that account from other accounts, so let’s just say it won’t be easy to migrate away from Yahoo, which I suspect is what they are counting on, that they have 280 million users’ proverbial “nuts” in a vise.”
That’s just three comments with close to two hundred upvotes among them. There are hundreds more where those came from if you want to read them.
Even a simple Twitter search for “Yahoo Mail” returns a seemingly endless amount of people experiencing issues with the service or just complaining about it in general. Here are a few just from the past hour. Again, this is a month after Yahoo Mail Classic was shut down, and there are plenty more.
Maybe I'll get used to the new @Yahoo mail – like one gets used to a goiter. Or maybe it's just time to move.
— Joe inMA (@Punterjoe) July 9, 2013
New #Yahoo Mail is rather a mess, hides much of the information in list view and MyYahoo seems deliberately hidden. Very poor.
— papageno (@papagen01) July 9, 2013
@yahoomail your new format sucks soooo bad. Pretty sure I speak for most everyone too
— Kevin Brill (@Kevin_Brill) July 9, 2013
Like so many others, very sorry to see the final demise of Yahoo Classic Mail. A really foolish move by @yahoomail
— Simon Marks (@SimonMarksFSN) July 9, 2013
@eestiglew After using @yahoomail for nearly 15 years it does not have reliability on any platform. Sick of the tech issues.
— Mel Huang (@mel_huang) July 9, 2013
Why does yahoo mail not have a delete all function? instead im deleting 100 at a time…and have 13k emails >_>
— THECAKEMONGREL (@Lightwave1454) July 9, 2013
Suffice it to say, the Yahoo Mail Twitter account has been busy with replies. So has the Yahoo Customer Care Twitter account that the Yahoo Mail account has been referring people to. So has the Yahoo Mail Support team at the Yahoo Help Community where the Yahoo Customer Care Twitter account has been referring people.
@CaligirlRenee Hi Renee, all Mail Support is over at the Yahoo! Help Community where Yahoo! staff can help you … http://t.co/rha5egGZNS
— Yahoo! Customer Care (@YahooCare) July 9, 2013
Now to be fair, there are probably a substantial number of users who are fine with the changes. Yahoo Mail has a ton of users, and content users of any product tend to be less vocal about their experiences than disgruntled users. This is perhaps a sad reality, but it is the truth. That said, this is a lot of complaining to still be occurring over a month after a product’s final roll-out – a product, let’s remember, that has actually been available since December.
Even the guy who ran Yahoo Mail since 2009 left the company (he now works at Disney), and rumor has it that his departure was not amicable, and that he left because he didn’t see eye-to-eye with CEO Marissa Mayer on her decision to overhaul Yahoo Mail.
And we haven’t even touched on Yahoo’s plan to give away inactive account IDs and email addresses, which at least one noted security expert has called “moronic”. That situation has its own set of opponents.
On the positive side, Yahoo did recently add some new Flickr integration to Yahoo Mail.
Is the new Yahoo Mail an improvement over the old one? For any of you who are actually happy with the product, here’s your chance to speak up and counter the naysayers. Let us know in the comments.