Yahoo! Mail Review

With the most incredible vehemence I do not recommend Yahoo! Mail in either free or paid form. I have been a paying Yahoo! Mail Plus customer, but I have been subject to an anti-spam feature. Yahoo! screens your outgoing mail messages that you type just as if it were an incoming message that a spam filter was sorting. If it looks like spam, the system presents you with a CAPTCHA text verification screen -- how annoying! One user wrote that when he failed to decode correctly that his message was deleted. And I have been paying for this? The text graphic is very, very hard to read.

This feature is quite unnecessary since Yahoo! Mail has outgoing sending limits, something that has annoyed me once but I was prepared to live with. This isn't really going to fight spam, except in the context of sophisticated robots that sign up for multiple accounts and send outgoing mail (each under the sending limit, of course). It will only statistically reduce the spam sent by abusive users.

For people like me, though, this restriction is an insult. I have provided my legitimate contact information with a working credit card to prove it. I wrote to their customer service, but they said they cannot disable the feature for individual accounts. I wrote back, "You just lost a customer. Congratulations."

This has been quite annoying because I was committed to Yahoo! Mail. It had the best spam filter and most uptime out of all the services that I had tried. However, with the possibility of having my outgoing personal or professional messages challenged or deleted, I cannot use this service.