Yahoo used to be an exclamation of celebration. On the other hand, yahoos were pretty clueless folks, provincial, ignorant, not terribly well educated. It was with a smidgen of wonderment that I first noted an email network with the name Yahoo: which did they mean?
Yahoo is not part of my email address. I have a much older name on my address, so old that it's been prevented from going through on form replies at times as being likely made up... or something. Eventually the company originating it "sold" those email addresses to Yahoo.com. It didn't change much. The address is the same, format was the same, the boxes in the same locations, using the same commands, in the same colors, shapes, and sizes. I particularly like the wide box for writing the body of any given email. I knew exactly where the new ones were, which were archived and how to send stuff there, how to designate spam and even rescue stuff from span.
Yesterday, with no fanfare or warning, everything changed but the name. I dread trying to read or send my email now. There's a space called folders but .... it's empty and no clue what goes where or how to organize. I can't find my old archived stuff. Things might or might not be going to spam, with or without my approval, but there's nothing named spam to go through to check. Somehow the system has decided what's important to me to read (yeah, sure....) and I had to search to find an "all" to click on to see what I was missing, but still with no indication of what might be spam. If you happen to send me stuff and know I want to hear from you but haven't replied, this may be why. If it's about that gadget you're selling or wonderful new financial plan,well......
When I want to send something out, especially in reply to what it's attached to, I'm used to the new, composed-with-proofing-required message going on the bottom. It was the widest part of the email, getting about 2/3 of the page, horizontally. Now it's squished between stuff at the top of the message - I finally found it! - and squeezed into a vertical column about an inch and a half wide. I can use a single word that takes up more space! And it limits just how many people I can send the same message to. Or at least I think that's what happens.
It's more complicated than that, starting with garbling up what I should just be able to click on among possible options to finish the first two characters into a choice of people to send to. There are a lot of people in that address book it's no longer communicating well with, and once it chooses the wrong one I have to fully delete after multiple tries, try typing it again, and hope this time some stupid algorithm picks a different one or just stays the hell out of the process! For some stupid incomprehensible reason it won't accept a backspace erase of characters on bad addresses. It will accept a full delete of everything, which is my frustration's last resort. (Well. tossing the laptop across the room is a bit too expensive for my budget, so it's not part of my last resort list. However, if I could locate the one the software Yahoos put their new program on... That might be worth worsening the pain in my bad shoulder for, right? )
How did I find this out? The first thing I needed to do with the new piece of crap software was type and send a birthday invitation to bunch of people. I finally made a single one successfully, sent it to my husband, and had him forward it in one group-send to all the recipients. He doesn't have Yahoo anymore, switching to Gmail months ago. (Did I need to mention that?)
Meanwhile I had to deal with disappearing messages whenever I hit a shift key to capitalize a new sentence, or addresses that weren't but just put the first letter followed by an X inside parentheses and couldn't be deleted, and about every other thing I could imagine somebody pulling on any given April 1st.
After fighting my way through that, Yahoo had the audacity - or hubris - to ask me for my feedback on their new system. After a couple thoroughly rude but honest paragraphs, including asking them to quit "improving" their system because they weren't, I asked for my old system back.
They've been a bit slow in acknowledging that.
Hey, I wonder of those DOGE boys were fooling around with some new project after Elon was done with them. Or is he actually done.....???????
ADDENDUM:
Having cooled down a bit after venting, I went back to my email out of desperation to explore some more and see what else I could figure out. Let's just say the results were mixed. I did manage to find my Spam folder. In it was one thing of interest. It said I needed to reactivate my account in the new system, or words to that effect, "click here" (which yielded no noticeable result,) and it had to be done by May 31st. I didn't even get the new stuff until yesterday. But as soon as I read it I went back to the main page to see if the opportunity for feedback was still up. It was. I used the opportunity:
Are you insane????? You tell me to click to update/activate my account in the new version or face deactivation, and then HIDE IT IN SPAM WITH WARNINGS ?????????
I did, of course, include a link to this. : )
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