Yahboo!

I've had a yahoo business mail account for a long time now - and it's worked fairly well most of the time. Mailbox search failed at one point, but other than that, well, it's email, what can you say.

Stupidly, I assumed that because I was forking out something like 6 pounds a month for the service (and a further fee for my own domain), that this somehow entitled me to any form of support whatsoever when things went wrong. Because of course, I could have had my domain hosted by gmail for free.

Well, I've learned my lesson now. Things started going wrong about a week ago when suddenly my phone indicated a login failure checking email. I thought nothing of it until I logged on from my home PC to be informed that my account 'might have been compromised'. Since my password is reasonably non-obvious, that was worrying, but things rapidly went downhill from there.

I tried resetting my password, since now my normal password no longer worked, but apparently the alternate email I'd set up was a hotmail account which I couldn't recall setting up. That's my fault, of course - moral number 1, don't forget your alternate email account. But we are talking something like a decade ago when this was set up.

I tried to recover access to my hotmail account but to be honest I wasn't entirely sure what the heck it was called. At any event, this proved fruitless so I tried contacting Yahoo support by email. 48 hours later I got a response apologising for the delay and telling me to ring customer support. I'd already tried that, of course, but it was obvious that this was an exercise in futility. There's an option for Yahoo small business - when you take it, an infuriatingly upbeat female voice smugly announces that telephone support is no longer available and I should sign in for support. But I can't sign in!. Ah, Kafka, where are you now. How you'd love this!. As for trying to contact account support, forget it. You just end up in a queue from hell. And, ringing long distance from London?. I don't think so.....

Meanwhile, the whole yahoo email infrastructure appears to have collapsed. Hence, it's even more impossible to get access now than it was a day or two ago. Apparently something has gone horribly wrong switching people over from 'classic' email to the new-look email. This wasn't my problem but now I am swamped in a huge queue of angry people who also can't reach their yahoo email, but for a completely different reason.

Well, I'm giving up for a few days. Fortunately, access to mail isn't life-threatening for me, but clearly it's essential to regain control of my domain and move everything to a company where customer service actually means something. A lesson learned, fortunately not the hard way, but if I had been running my own business, this could have been catastrophic.