Issues retrieving from external accounts

June 3rd, 2008 at 7:38 pm

I have been a loyal Yahoo (mail plus) user for over 6 years and this latest problem is the last straw. I recently converted my father to Yahoo Mail Plus as I have several friends and family. Two of them have experienced this problem while none of us have had problems with our G mail act. Hopefully Yahoo can correct the problems and realize its full potential.

June 4th, 2008 at 2:07 am

I have been with your mail service for a very long time. Never had any problems. Until this last year. Not only have I missed POP mail but your mail site comes up very S L O W! What is going on at Yahoo?
I have set up an account with Gmail. But I hate to leave you people because you have been the best for so long. But I guess very good thing comes to an end

June 4th, 2008 at 3:54 am

This is good to hear…I thought things were fixed yesterday because everything seemed to be back to normal until 5:30pm eastern time when the errors starting popping up again. This morning I checked external pop mail and was todl I had 2 new messages…45 minutes later they still aren’t anywhere to be found. I really hope the fix gets here soon.

June 4th, 2008 at 4:11 am

[...] Update 4th June 2008 It seems Yahoo is finally aware of the problem(2) http://www.ymailblog.com/blog/2008/06/external-accounts/ [...]

June 4th, 2008 at 5:25 am

As a paid Mail Plus user, I am dismayed that something so essential as external pop mail retrieval got botched at Yahoo!. By now, you must have QA and testing for software and hardware changes – we’re a decade in to that kind of safety. You’ve made two giant blunders: 1) Allowing this to happen at all, and 2) Not fixing it immediately. Email is a mission-critical application. If you are getting paid for it (as you are in my case) you have to deliver it continuously. My DNS host is flawless, by DSL provider is flawless, but Yahoo! Mail Plus has been slow, buggy, and now simply won’t perform a basic email task. GET IT TOGETHER! I am already looking for alternatives.

June 4th, 2008 at 7:27 am

Y! Plus user here with no major errors to complain about. I love the new AJAX interface and plan to keep using it.

Actually I like it so much I want to have it retrieve my gmail too, but Yahoo’s POP retrieval doesn’t support SSL so I can’t get it. Any plans to support that? Just thought I’d ask while we’re (almost) on the subject.

June 4th, 2008 at 9:45 am

I agree with the SSL poster – when are you guys going to support SSL so I can get my GMail in my Yahoo inbox?

June 4th, 2008 at 10:03 am

Eric,
I had the same problem when mail goes through a server Yahoo doesn’t trust. The delay is to deter SPAM for some reason. There are some online forms you can use to request Yahoo investigate the server, but I haven’t had luck there. I ended up sending the “untrusted” mail to gmail which (for now) accepts it gladly. (And hence why I want Yahoo to read my gmail.)

June 4th, 2008 at 11:14 am

@Steve P. & Mike,
-
YMail does support SSL. I know plenty of people who POP their GMail into their YMail accounts.
-
Ryan
-

June 4th, 2008 at 11:19 am

Thank you Ryan Knight for the update after six days of this ongoing issue. I would encourage the Yahoo Mail team to be more proactive with these messages in the future to help stem customer complaints and concerns and just out of plain old respect for its customers. If Yahoo could cut this notice time-frame in half that would be an improvement. I think it’s pretty clear just how dependant people are on email and sometimes just a notice of acknowledgement of the issue is enough.

June 4th, 2008 at 12:02 pm

I don’t even know why anyone would offer external POP. From a technical support perspective, it is a troubleshooting nightmare. Because if some other service provider’s POP3 service goes down, and Yahoo! is not able to download that other service provider’s e-mail for a user, the user is left thinking it is Yahoo! Mail that is broken.

Good luck with the HTML rendering issue, though. With the broken HTML people are sending these days, particularly with Outlook, it’s a miracle you guys can even keep the surrounding CSS tables, etc. from getting busted.

June 4th, 2008 at 12:09 pm

This is truly unbelievable. I have not been able to properly check my external mail since Memorial Day Weekend. That’s going on 8 days. Yahoo first sent me a canned response and days later said they were working on the problem. Maybe Yahoo should concentrate on providing their most basic services instead of Jessie Baylin. This problem is costing us users big time. How about an update as to why it happened and how its getting fixed?

June 4th, 2008 at 2:21 pm

I keep getting this error. Is this the same error!?!?!?!?!

Sorry, the page you requested was not found.

Please check the URL for proper spelling and capitalization. If you’re having trouble locating a destination on Yahoo!, try visiting the Yahoo! home page or look through a list of Yahoo!’s online services. Also, you may find what you’re looking for if you try searching below.

advanced searchmost popular
Please try Yahoo! Help Central if you need more assistance.

June 4th, 2008 at 7:35 pm

Spent the better part of today looking over alternatives to yahoo mail. I’ve been yahooing for years now and have loved the improvements made to the look and function of the webmail. My filing filters have failed, i get almost constant busy reports when checking mail, and find out even when yahoo acts like it’s picked up the mail it has actually left much of it behind. Any suggestions from those who have moved on – i need a workable solution. Don’t really like the look and feel of gmail.

June 5th, 2008 at 1:48 am

Hi Ryan, Thanks for the update.

As a Y plus! user have been very happy with the service for years. Hopefully this is only a blip. Customer support helped as much as they could, but there was no problem management. It was apparent very early on that there was a trend with this problem but no acknowledgement.

However saying that, I’ve noticed a couple of improvements in yahoo mail.

SPAM – I’ve noticed that when collecting my external mail, it filters my spam, which I’m grateful for (is this a by product of the current issues, or an intended feature?)

SSL Support – This is very useful, now you can pop gmail (very useful for users that would like to use Gmail for spam filtering)

June 5th, 2008 at 2:47 am

Thanks! Is fixed for me now.

June 5th, 2008 at 3:30 am

Mine works…should I say worked. Now I’m getting server is busy errors again. Been on and off like this for a few days.

June 5th, 2008 at 4:56 am

This problem still going on now, been over a week too. The emails generally never can be access from an outside pop source and randomly it will batch download suddenly old messages from the pop account, but not the most recent emails either.

This is a mess, the main reason we use Yahoo! Mail and pay for it is to filter external mail sources into a more secure browser based email service like Yahoo!’s….. but now the reason we paid for this is not working.

June 5th, 2008 at 4:59 am

hi

retrieving mail from external pop server is now slow, very slow, sometimes ending up on the page of the account information.
these are little things.
what is more surprising is that, I asked that the retrieved mail stays on the original pop server, every time I keep on retrieving the same email that I already had retrieved.
this stops only, when from home, i am able to get my mail directly from this non yahoo pop server.
thanks
P

June 5th, 2008 at 5:38 am

I am having problems with emails replicating hundreds of times and am unable to access my emails on microsoft outlook. Something is stuck and number 42 email and i have no idea how to clear it. Is this part of the problem others are experiencing?

June 5th, 2008 at 5:59 am

The search function has broken since last Friday or so. Customer service tells me today that the problem still hasn’t been found and there’s no date for a fix. How can this possibly take so long?

June 5th, 2008 at 6:17 am

Glad to finally find some documentation on this. I contacted Yahoo support about the problem 6/4/08 and was told (somewhat snippily) that it must be a problem with my external mail service because there was nothing wrong with Yahoo. It would be nice if your support people knew what was going on.

June 5th, 2008 at 6:32 am

Y!MailPlus user here, still doesn’t work for me. Shouldn’t the paid accounts get the update first?

June 5th, 2008 at 7:06 am

Hey, I’m also a Yahoo mail Plus subscriber and I’ve never been able to check my pop mail. There are a variety of different error messages, the latest is:

Server pop3 is busy. Another POP session may be active. Please try again later.

Well, no matter when “later” is, I try and I try and nothing. I’m not threatening to switch, I really like Yahoo, I just really want a better update of what is going on? I really have to agree with Jason when he says:
“How about an update as to why it happened and how its getting fixed?”

June 5th, 2008 at 8:01 am

Hey, please fix this asap. My error msg when trying to get POP mail:

Server willowstudios.com is busy. Another POP session may be active.

June 5th, 2008 at 8:19 am

I’m still getting the server busy errors for all of my other email accounts that I’m trying to pull into Yahoo Mail Plus. This has been 8 days that it hasn’t worked correctly. What especially kills me is that most of my other accounts are Yahoo accounts and they still don’t pull in correctly. I can’t believe this issue has gone on for this long! But then again, in the last 3 months I’ve experienced other problems like getting emails hours after they were sent, so maybe this should be a surprise.

June 5th, 2008 at 8:23 am

Very disappointing–the POP access thing seemed to be fixed yesterday (finally), and now is not working.

On several occasions, I submitted an “error 14″ report as prompted when the errors occurred initially, and have yet to get a single response from Yahoo. That’s unacceptable.

At least I finally discovered that I can “forward with attachments” by Ctrl+clicking on the Forward button (who thought *that* was a good idea? why not just leave the old drop-down Forward button in place?????)

This whole upgrade experience has been very, very disappointing. Other than the automatic draft saving, every change I’ve noticed has been for the worse.

June 5th, 2008 at 8:58 am

Yahoo continues to drop the ball on most every aspect of mail service. I’m both a plus subscriber and have general yahoo id as well. Across the board – from desktop web browser to pda browser access I’ve experienced a frustrating level of service between server busy screens, slow page displays (not my box or connection), inability to access subfolder attachments, sending messages with feedback that they’re sent when they’re never stored in the sent folder (per my setting) or received by the recipient… it goes on and on. It looks like yahoo uses their clients as QA and have no pre-production release vetting at all.

June 5th, 2008 at 9:15 am

Just a suggestion here: Maintain a status page of email service issues under investigation or repair… this would be especially useful for *us* paid business users that rely on email.

Seriously, I’m experiencing an almost continuous problem of the yahoo mail website displaying ‘message sent’ while the message was neither received by the recipient, saved in the sent folder (per my settings) or bounced back to me.

In another situation – another yahoo email user had an email bounced back to their ID with an email time-out status, retries exhausted – and that was all within the yahoo infrustructure.

I’ll venture – from past experience – that if I report these issues it will be dismissed as my problem or somehow fixed (when they’re not).

June 5th, 2008 at 10:50 am

As a long-time Plus subscriber, I’m really annoyed with this problem. It really amazes me how companies can screw up this type of thing and then A) Not acknowledge it in a timely manner (if at all), B) Take far too long to fix it, C) Not see these problems before they roll out an *upgrade*.

And what’s with the *new* Yahoo! mail still being half-baked. Setting options, etc. still requires you to bonk back to the classic mode… and it’s been like that for s-o-o-o long. What, do they have one guy working on this system?!?

I sincerely hope these problems and lack of effort/accountability/diligence are addressed soon, though I’m not going to hold my breath.

June 5th, 2008 at 11:13 am

I just got off the phone with a customer service manager who stated he was the highest in command that I would be able to talk with. His answers were actualy less than what are here by Ryan Knight. Ryan, I thank you for the update!!! My issue with customer service is that for the past 9 days they have been saying, “Engineering is aware of the issue!”. Now they are saying that engineering was and is aware of the issues and don’t have a clue of when it will get fixed. The CSR I spoke with said engineering’s initial estimate would be 3-5 days to get it fixed, but on his calendar we are on the 9th day now and it’s still not fixed. I requested to speak to QA since QA should be the customer’s voice in the design/engineering process and they said no go!
My concern is that if this is truly not fixed yet, how long will it take before they get the right person(s) with the right skill(s) on the job? Somebody may be working on it, but it’s obviously not the right person if it’s taken 9 days and still not fixed. What happened to reverting back to the way it was until you work out the bugs on the test server? Did you use a test server?

When is management going to get involved and start cracking the whip because the response from customer service, and the lack of info provided other than we’re aware of the issue is totally unacceptable.

As many other users stated, I too am looking for another provider after being a loyal customer for over 6 years. Do we get a refund since our service was not provided?

The worst response I got was when I asked the CSR what he was going to do with my complaint. He stated “nothing”. So I clarified and asked if he meant that he was going to put it in the circular file and he said, “Yes!” Well (Chris from issue 7403447), even if that is what you were going to do with it, you sure don’t tell the customer that. As a customer service manager, I expect you to be the voice of the customer and go to bat for us with engineering and management since you won’t let us push the issue?

PLEASE GET THE RIGHT PEOPLE ON THE JOB AND GET IT FIXED! THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE CUSTOMER SERVICE!!!!!!!!

June 5th, 2008 at 11:27 am

I’m sure that any IMAP rollout is on indefinite hold while this stuff’s going on… Damn…

June 5th, 2008 at 11:45 am

I have been having lots of problems with forwarding to my yahoo account. Is this going to get fixed soon? I can’t be missing emails b/c yahoo can’t get them to my inbox. I’ve been loyal for yahoo for almost 10 yrs and I would hate to have to move to gmail.

June 5th, 2008 at 12:30 pm

I spoke to a Yahoo customer service rep who told me that the problem was (I’m not making this up) that I needed to change my password. I did. Same problem subsists and now I have a new password to remember.

I have been a Yahoo member for over 10 years, and this is perhaps the oddest problem I have had. One of the features of MailPlus (premium service) is pop-access… how can pop access be a problem… that’s access is the point of the service.

Hope it is fixed soon.

June 5th, 2008 at 2:40 pm

Wow; sure is hot in here! I have to admit I was not very happy either, not so much that the system is broken but that there’s been no feedback. Thank you for putting up this post. I only became aware of it because I have been tracking Yahoo Answers for any information on this problem and someone posted this link. A mass email to all Yahoo accounts explaining the problem and that you are working on it would likely have prevented a lot of hard feelings among Yahoo mail clients.

I have been a Yahoo mail user since 1999 and have no interest in finding another provider. I can be patient for a fix as long as I know what the status is. Please continue to keep us informed.

June 5th, 2008 at 4:48 pm

Two external e-mail accounts were registered for
retrieval by my Yahoo Account. I clicked on the
“RETRIEVE ONLY NEW MESSAGES” option. From one of the accounts my Yahoo retrieved 54 (read) mails
dated March 2007 thru July 2007 – newer, also read
mails, were not retrieved nor were 2 unread mails
dated today. From the other account 12 (also read)
mails were retrieved. These were fairly recent.
You may need to define what should be understood
by “retrieve only new messages”

Regards.

June 5th, 2008 at 7:33 pm

This is the first MAJOR problem I’ve had with my external accounts in the Yahoo interface since I started using it in 1995! Three days without getting my email the way I like it is a pain and shouldn’t have happened, but with POP3 accounts I can still emergency retrieve email on my phone or with outlook or something else. It’s not the end of the world and for just $20/year I can’t complain too much. But they need to get it fixed fast and not let it happen again or I’ll be done with it as I’m sure many others will be too.

June 5th, 2008 at 11:30 pm

The problem was fixed for a little while, then comes back intermittently. Also, retrieved mails are not getting sorted to the correct folder. AND a lot of the mail (which was correctly sorted before this problem) are now getting thrown into the Spam folder. What gives?

June 6th, 2008 at 4:17 am

The apparent change since yesterday is that now any attempt to retrieve external mail just times out, instead of throwing an error message.

I can’t believe it’s taken over a week to address this. My view of Yahoo’s potential as a service provider is being pretty severely shaken.

June 6th, 2008 at 6:29 am

Your last update was actually June 3rd. Do you have any news?

June 6th, 2008 at 6:44 am

The time lapse between when mail is downloaded and appears in the Inbox is much too long. Will this be corrected?

June 6th, 2008 at 6:50 am

this has been an ongoing problem since about may 22nd for me, and it still is NOT working….

June 6th, 2008 at 9:30 am

My external email checking is now fixed and filters are working.

version 1.2.0
build: 975.45
05/30/2008

The new update appears to check all messages automatically, even from POP accounts. Perhaps this was the intended update that broke the external POP in the first place?

June 6th, 2008 at 9:36 am

On top of everything that’s been said, when I finally get the messages in my mailbox I can’t tell which of 3 accounts consolidated in my box each belongs to without opening them because all destination addresses have been changed to that of my Yahoo account in the preview pane. Can we please go back to the old format?

June 6th, 2008 at 10:04 am

Hi everyone,
-
I’m checking with different teams to get to the bottom of this. Sorry for the delays, and I should have some clearer details later today.
-
Ryan
-

June 6th, 2008 at 10:50 am

Please fix this as soon as possible. I have been using yahoo mail for over 10 years and have never had this persistent error before. Being evil, if necessary roll back and have that pushed to all the servers…

Cheers

Ash

June 6th, 2008 at 1:58 pm

Mine is still not working. It has been two full weeks for me. I am still getting POP server is busy or an error message. I am so frustrated. I was told two weeks ago when I first called that the Yahoo engineers were working “like crazy” to fix the problem. They claim it is intermittent. Not with mine it isn’t. I, too, have a paid account. I own a business so it is imperative that I receive my email as soon as possible and without glitches. Two weeks is ridiculous. To top it off, Yahoo should have been proactive in terms of letting us know what was going on before June 3 when something was finally posted. Of course, come to think of it, how were they going to alert us since we are NOT getting our email!!

June 7th, 2008 at 5:23 am

I want to put a word in for MAC users who are limited to using System OS9.1 and Netscape 7.0 due to hardware restraints. My ISP is SBC/Yahoo and when alterations occur it seems they are never downward compatibile. They should be… maybe just not have access to newer options would be OK – our penance for not affording new computers. But no. You’re left dead in the water. When you send in a Tech Help, as soon as they see a “non-supported” browser then it’s GAMEOVER! – for you that is! End of Help. Kaput. Goodbye we can’t help you ‘Old-Timer’. What happened to Beta Tests? EDITORIAL: Seems many tech products are offered for sale before the Engineering is complete. Ya’ Think!?!
As a result of all this Yahoo technical anarchy as of late, I can’t send any emails. Who knows if any one will listen to us ‘Old-Timers’.

June 7th, 2008 at 6:33 am

i am unable to aceess my inbox massages.

June 8th, 2008 at 10:18 pm

Hi,
2 days back i registered for yahoo mail plus.When i tried to retrieve all my mails into outlook 2003, i see out of 920 mails only 850 mails have got popped.
For few mails i see only the html format.
In few sites i saw that Yahoo cannot forward mails greater than 2 MB.
But all the mail which havent got popped are not >2MB.
How do i get all my mails into Outllok.

June 9th, 2008 at 5:27 am

checking external mail accounts still down with error code 16.
sometime works, but extreme slow.
or wrong message that the external mail server is busy.
if it works sometimes, downloaded messages are not displayed immediately (horrible!).
they are not going in the right forlders or filters are ingnored!
no problem getting these mails with other email clients.
two weeks now having this error.
i am a paying mail plus user.
whilst chatting with yahoo customer care they do not know about this error and that many users have this problem.
this is going to COST US MONEY!

June 9th, 2008 at 8:48 am

i see the bulk folder changed to spam folder!
and something in my mail box about apperance changed!!
i need know about that and resolve..
i’m worry somebody can accses to my
mailbox.

June 9th, 2008 at 10:22 am

Well, at least it sounds like the rest of you can at least access your email. I cannot !!!!!
Every time I try to enter my email a box comes up with”Chat within your email” with a smaller box”go to your inbox”
When this box comes up, my email page whites out. You can see a bare shadow of the page, but cannot click anything.I have not been able to check my email on 2 of my accounts-they have the so called NEW mail.I can only access email on 1 account since it has the old style email. How do we fix this or get back to the previous version.
1 of the accounts I cannot access is my business account. HELP !!!!!!!!!

June 9th, 2008 at 3:09 pm

thank you

June 10th, 2008 at 4:54 pm

Wow – I am totally blown away by how incompetent Yahoo has gotten. I’ve also been a loyal customer for many, many years. When I noticed this problem wasn’t going away, and not knowing how widespread it was, I wrote to customer service. I’ve been in tech all my life, so I know what info they need to troubleshoot. I pre-emptively told them that I’d tried to access my POP3 account on 2 different macs using 4 different browsers. Their response was to send me instructions for clearing the cache on my WINDOWS browser. They completely ignored the text of my email and pretended this was a new issue.

The second message was even better. I re-iterated that I’d tried this on multiple browsers and have also been working with IT for my mail server. Here’s their response (I’m not making this up):

“I’ve investigated the issue you mentioned in your message. The good news is that I couldn’t reproduce the issue as you described. It’s likely
that the problem you were having was a temporary one and shouldn’t happen again… There are a few things you can try if you keep having issues.
- Try a different web browser”

That’s it. That’s their solution. Try a different web browser. And pretend no one else is having this problem? WTF???

This just blows me away. Yahoo has completely screwed up this time. The tech problems are bad enough. But this kind of response is reason alone to switch to a different mail client. I’m so outta here.

June 11th, 2008 at 6:54 am

Any news on a resolution time for this issue? It’s still not fixed.

June 11th, 2008 at 12:01 pm

I didn’t know about this problem and truth be told I haven’t experienced any problems with mail until today. Hope you’ll fix it soon :-I

June 11th, 2008 at 7:10 pm

Nope – still not fixed. I really can’t believe this has taken this long. Losing all hope…

June 11th, 2008 at 11:54 pm

I believe that I have tracked down the error. If you go to your Mail > Mail Options > Accounts -> “Add or edit account”… edit your external pop mail definition. In there you will see “Use Filter” option is below (from what I recollect this is new and the source of problem). Uncheck the “use filter” option and save the new definition.

Please note I have not thoroughly tested this.

If this works, please do send out a general email with these instructions to those that are affected.

Best

Ash

http://www.medgle.com/

June 13th, 2008 at 5:52 pm

All incoming mail shows link when there is a photo. Have been getting calls from the persons receiving my emails cannot open the link. I went back to the ’send’ mail and I was not able to open any email that contained photo/pictures. Is it possible for me to go back to my original system? Thanks

June 16th, 2008 at 4:50 pm

i can not get my mail?????????

June 17th, 2008 at 11:58 am

I can access my business email from the blackberry, however, I’m not able to via the web.

June 18th, 2008 at 1:16 pm

Yahoo Mail + POP Gmail don’t work for me!
Any idea?

June 19th, 2008 at 5:43 am

i saw in my mail box status bar,the latest word is something like ghAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
or other …i think its not normal ..i don’t know how can i do?
is there security problem for my mail box with trojan or others hack and crack from someone…i someone can access to my email address?

July 9th, 2008 at 12:36 pm

This is ridiculous. I cannot check my mail Neither on the web NOR using outlook (as I always have used outlook) and I was on the phone with Yahoo today for over an hour with no resolution. They said I need to call Microsoft. WHAT! The problem is OBVIOUSLY with the Yahoo!mail system. I get “mailbox busy” errors and “sorry the inconvenience webpage” and in outlook, i get “server timed out” errors. This is riduculous, especially since I use my email for business purposes. PLEASE HELP ME

September 18th, 2008 at 7:24 am

I have some issues since about 3 or 4 days..
everything loads unproperly, dunno what’s going on but the side bars and other bars load in not a proper way and the message bar dissapeared…
is this bug known? and if it is what can i do