For the past 3~4 days I’ve been experiencing problems with Yahoo! Mail. I’ve asked few of my friends and relatives and they all seem to be having the same problems. The problem is affecting both Yahoo Mail classic and the new ajaxian Yahoo mail.

Symptoms observed
1) Yahoo! Mail rejects your login credential straight away. You are not able to login, either using just your yahoo ID or the (recently added mechanism) your full yahoo mail address (yourid@yahoo.com).
2) You are able to login, but the page is not rendered properly. Yahoo mail classic displays your mails but clicking on them wouldn’t open them (only mail subject is show, the body is missing). New Yahoo Mail would render only partially, contents of folders (Inbox etc.) are not listed.

I’ve tested the problem on Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu) and Windows XP with variety of browsers. Here’s the complete list of browsers

Windows XP: IE7, Opera, Firefox 2
Linux (Ubuntu): Opera 9.27, Firefox 2, Firefox 3 beta, Epiphany
Linux (Fedora): Opera, Firefox 2, Firefox 3

On Epiphany, Yahoo Mail tends to behave properly most of the times, but on all other browsers it mis-behaves 100% of times. (This is my observation).

I dunno what the guys at Yahoo are doing but this is really p*ss*ng off their users. I am, for sure, really irritated. I use Yahoo Mail heavily and this is causing real inconvenience to me. It is not just a few minutes glitch, its been consistently happening for a long time now. Are there any other people experiencing the same?

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

Quoting from the Yahoo Mail Blog

We are still evaluating the reports of inconsistent html rendering, but I do have an update regarding reported issues with the retrieving of POP email from external accounts.

Our engineers have reviewed the issue, identified the root cause, and are already underway rolling out the fix. Some users should see improved performance immediately, while others may not notice it for a few days (as it hits each farm).

We are very sorry for any frustration you guys have experienced, and for not getting updates out to you sooner.

As for the problem (1) I guess it has been resolved. At least I haven’t faced any problems today logging into Yahoo mail.

Update: 10th June 2008
I guess the problems described in this post have been resolved by Yahoo, I haven’t had any problems for more than 24 hours now. A big thanks to Yahoo! team. Hopefully things wouldn’t break down again, and if they do, would be resolved quickly.