Leaving Yahoo Mail Plus

Admission: I have a love/hate relationship with Yahoo Mail Plus.

I’ve been using Yahoo Mail since 1996 and I signed up for the premium service known as Yahoo Mail Plus in 2004.  The feature that won me over was their disposable email addresses that allows you to organize incoming email and fight spam.

Having a set of disposable email addresses in my pocket was like wearing an invisibility cloak online and the geek in me fell love!

7 years and 25,000 emails later, I quit.

Over the years, Yahoo introduced a few nuisances that annoyed me to no end. Here’s a short list of the pain-points:

• All-new mail, without all of the old functionality (such as adding disposable addresses)
• Yahoo Mail Classic, whose interface kept changing.
• Disposable addresses had to be setup before hand (not on-the-fly)

When Yahoo announced the all-new mail, I quickly jumped at the chance to check out the new features.  However, I was quickly disappointed to find that certain key features (such as disposable addresses) required that I switch back into Yahoo Mail Classic and traverse a series of pages. It was annoying enough to keep me away from the all-new version for several years.

Recently, Yahoo announced that Yahoo Mail Classic will be phased out at the end of 2011.  (Ruh-Roh)  Time to get reacquainted with the all-new version and see if the key features work.  (Note: I’ve confirmed that Disposable Email Addresses are now supported in the new version. Good times!)

So what is this key, broken  feature that finally pushed me over the edge and having me scrambling to find an alternative email provider? In one word: search.

Filing for my 2010 taxes, I need to quickly pull some receipts from Amazon. I regularly order from Amazon for both personal and business purposes, so placing a global filter was not an option (otherwise, the emails would have flowed nicely into my Business Expense folders).

Using the search feature for the keyword “amazon” returned zero (nada, zilch, etc.) results for 2010. All manners of spelling, including the custom email address for orders from Amazon resulted in an equally unnerving conclusion. Yahoo cannot find my mail.

I have placed at least 10 orders with Amazon from the past year and this was a big, red flag. Turns out, I wasn’t alone as Larry Dignan from ZDNet can attest in his August 2010 article “The Yahoo Mail search bug: One year later“.

Leaving Yahoo Mail Plus is a bittersweet experience as I recently started using the service on my iPad and I love the new interface. The UI and their new email notification icons were a welcomed sight. The idea of manually looking through 25,000 emails for one receipt, not so much.

At this point, I am moving emails  from my folders into the main inbox (since mail in other folders do not get POP’ed) and downloading it into my laptop with Thunderbird. I can only move 200 emails at a time, so that definitely adds to the fun.

Seeking an alternative, I’ve signed up for an account with neomailbox.net, as they have had positive reviews from privacy-concerned individuals. The servers are Swiss hosted, so that adds a judicial layer of protection in the event that is ever needed. They also have on-the-fly disposable emails, custom domain email hosting,  and hopefully and functioning search feature.  I’m eager to test it out once I migrate my existing email accounts.

Speaking of which, I have close to 500 disposable email addresses with Yahoo Mail Plus and about 3-weeks to migrate my accounts. Aren’t I a lucky son-of-a-gun?

Update 8/22/11: Most of my mail is now handled by http://www.fastmail.fm/?STKI=5811993 . I absolutely love this service, so expect a review soon!

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