As mentioned in a previous post, I had some significant issues getting Yahoo! Mail up and running. The issue is now resolved. For the record, I believe that the issue stemmed from the fact that I established my Yahoo! ID back in 1995 (or thereabouts) and did not sign up for mail service on the ID at the time. I did not really want to establish a new ID for the test. Anyway, here’s the scoop:

• February 25th: Original ticket submitted
• February 27th: Stock answer that the problem is temporary, and maybe I should click refresh on my browser. Not sure why it took two days for what an autoresponder could have done, but whatever. Responded that I tried IE and Firefox, logged out, logged in, etc., etc.
• February 28th: Received response that they are looking into the issue.
• March 5th: Responded to Yahoo! asking for an update. Received response that they’re still working on it.
• March 22nd: Responded to Yahoo! asking for an update.
• March 29th: After a full week, I received a message saying “the issue may have been transient and appears to be resolved now”. My conclusion at this point - Yahoo! did not actually look into the issue over the entire month. I’m basically back at “please hit refresh”.
• April 1st: Hadn’t checked into my email, so I read the March 29th message and responded with “This is not yet resolved.”
• April 2nd: Finally I seem to get someone’s attention. They ask me for a bunch of account details (not sure why they need this, but they’re finally looking at my account setup rather than assuming I’m reporting a general server outage).
• April 3rd: Respond with account details
• April 3rd: Yahoo! replies to my response asking for account details. After a month of back and forth blaming me for not hitting refresh, now they prove they can’t even read.
• April 4th: I send my reply “I already did. Please see original message below”
• April 6th: Michelle replies to me stating a definitive, “We have completed our investigation of the issue you reported, and were able to identify the cause and take corrective mesaures to address it…”. This sounds positive!
• April 7th: I verify that I now have a Yahoo! mail account and can log in. I send a “It’s resolved - thank you!”.

The entire time I had hoped to actually call them so I could convince someone on the phone that this is an account issue, not a server issue, but alas, no support phone numbers were to be found. I actually considered walking to their offices near Kelly’s work either to explain the situation, strangle someone, or both.

Anyway, in a record 7 weeks, Yahoo! was able to fix my problem. One good thing in all this is that Yahoo! sent me a survey after nearly every response. I sent some very strong messages in both the scores and the write in comments. I hope they read them.