Over the last several days I’ve received a lot of feedback from users, both in comments and in email, regarding how we’ve been communicating information about our recent SMTP issues. The majority of people feel that we should have reached out sooner, and that the blog was not an adequate channel to reach everyone. By now, impacted users should have received a Service Announcement, but I still wanted to take a moment to address those concerns.
It’s my goal that people become confident that when there are issues impacting their Yahoo! Mail experience, they can look to the blog for the latest news and information. With that being the case, I understand that I will need to work very hard to identify these situations and get appropriate updates out as soon as possible. In this case there was concern that given the advanced nature of the impacted feature, I might end up confusing a great deal of people who weren’t impacted. Ultimately we decided that even at the risk of confusing people, we needed to get the information out to impacted users as quickly as possible.
That brings me to the second concern many people have raised, and that is that the blog is not an adequate channel to get the word out to everyone. While I’d like for that not to be true, I know that not everyone reads this blog (yet). However, we knew that it would also take a few days to pull together a message to send to the appropriate users, and I wanted to make sure that folks seeking more information had an opportunity to find it. That included not only a blog post, but updated Help pages and Customer Care.
As I mentioned above, all impacted users should now have received a Service Announcement, but I believed that if I could start pushing out helpful information even sooner through the blog … that it was worthwhile. Rest assured that had this been a planned change we would have certainly emailed users ahead of time to give them a chance to prepare for the switch.
And don’t forget, when you reach out to me with an issue it’s important to know what to include and expect. I’m not an alternative to Customer Care, so please continue any efforts you have made to reach out to them for help. If you are sharing an issue with me (via comments or email) please be as detailed as possible. That means letting me know your operating system, browser, specific error, etc. That helps me distinguish between a unique user issue (that I can’t really help with) or a larger issue (that I can get our engineers to fix for everyone at once).
Thanks for reading,
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Ryan K.
Community Manager
Yahoo! Mail |