Yahoo mail, WTF. Please help. Desperate

[AndyP]

Having major problems with yahoo. Nothing to do with being hacked but all of a sudden I cannot send emails from any device iMac, iPad nor Android 6 phone.

I have removed accounts, reloaded them, manually set incoming and outgoing servers and still mails just sit :-

1) in Outbox on iPad (using Mail app)
2) The android (motoG) phone refuses to connect to the outgoing server while setting up.
3)When I try to send a mail on the iMac it just keeps flashing up the mail but not sending it.

All 3 devices are receiving mail without issues.

I have never screamed at the bloody things before but I am fast losing it :twisted: :evil:

Any ideas?

 

[9fingers]

Make a cuppa and calm down dear!
Yahoo currently have problems with sending mail. Google is your friend.
Bob

 

[AndyP]

Thanks Bob,
but the problem is only with the mail apps. If I send in using webmail on firefox mails get sent without an issue.
Google only seems to have info from the down detector sites and user comments. Have you send anything more "official"

 

[9fingers]

Based on my experience of running various yahoo groups, they never admit to problems until they are fixed. Yahoo are getting worse and worse. I've given up trying to do any moderation on my iPhone and just use the desktop even that is flaky.
I'm not surprised if there is a difference in performance between mail programmes and webmail. They are different routes in.
I'd give serious consideration to gradually moving over to an alternative mail provider despite the pain in the transition.
Bob

 

[AndyP]

I had been thinking about that especially with their latest financial woes and I do have gmail accounts already.
Is it possible to move all emails from one account to another?

 

[9fingers]

I don't understand moving mail from one to another?
Just redirect new mail on yahoo to gmail from now on and reply from gmail. Old mail should be on your local machine anyway mine is?
Bob

 

[Robert]

I moved my emails to my domain from various ISP accounts as they tie you in if you want to leave the ISP. It took several months as the addresses were used in so many places. Lots of log ins and address details at vendors etc. to change.

I set up a rule for the account I wanted to stop. It moved all mail with the 'to' address I no longer wanted into a folder. Then it was a case of going to the sender and changing details. kept doing that until nothing I cared about arrived in that folder.

 

[RogerS]

....Old mail should be on your local machine anyway mine is?
Bob

That depends if it's POP3 or IMAP, surely ?

 

[9fingers]

....Old mail should be on your local machine anyway mine is?
Bob

That depends if it's POP3 or IMAP, surely ?

Just looked at my settings and there is no mention of IMAP whatever that is.
The server address is pop.ntlworld.com so I presume I'm using POP. it has been left since the original settings given to me by ntl decades ago.
All my mail is on my local machine filed annually - sometimes useful to go back to find the odd item or contact.

I certainly don't want to be reliant on long term storage by my ISP and I throw away all gmail each day once it has been dealt with.

Bob

 

[AndyP]

I don't understand moving mail from one to another?
Just redirect new mail on yahoo to gmail from now on and reply from gmail. Old mail should be on your local machine anyway mine is?
Bob

I meant creating a new email account moving all the emails from yahoo to new account then closing the yahoo account altogether. I already use POP forwarding to move 2 yahoo and 1 gmail account to the iMac mail app.

 

[9fingers]

I suppose I was thinking more of the method Robert wrote about.

Gradually letting Yahoo wither until there is no more useful mail turning up there and then killing it off.
You possibly need to tell all your regulars about the change though and get them to modify their address books.
Although I religiously change the reply to address on some mails, it seems the recipients email systems reply to sender rather than the specified "reply address"

My set up is not perfect but all mail comes to my laptop and is stored there. All other machines round the house can look at web mail if needed and my iphone can see and reply to all the mail relayed via gmail.
The laptop is the "boss" and where I usually reply to important mail and so keeps a long term record.
The laptop is double backed up each night on a network drive. Not lost anything (yet!)

Imap seems to be more about keeping mail on remote servers :shock: - presumably cloud like? I don't do cloud for anything important.

Bob

 

[RogerS]

Yup. IMAP keeps your mail on the server and that has the advantage of being accessible from anywhere that you have internet access.

If you want to keep your IMAP mail on a local machine then there is a very simple way to do that. You make a rule (assuming your mail client will let you do that) that will automatically 'move' all incoming mail to a separate folder in your mail client. That 'move' command gets interpreted as a Copy and Delete - ie it copies the mail to the folder (as I mentioned) and then deletes it from the server.

I have my IMAP mail client set up with quite a few rules and folders. TheWoodhaven. eBay. WoodworkUK. Mail that arrives automatically gets sent to the relevant folder. That keeps my main Inbox clear of notifications and the like. It then becomes very easy to go into TheWoodhaven folder, do a Command-A t select them all and hit Delete.

There is a downside, however, and that is that if I have my Mac running then this happens pretty regularly and so if I am away and want to check mail then I won't see any mails notifying me about TWH2 or eBay etc. But then Tapatalk has the former covered off so not really an issue.

Bob's right re trying to send mail. SMTP uses port 25 (and 110 IIRC) to send using a 'proper' outgoing mail server. Sending mail via the web email client uses the port 80.

I think that Andy wants to transfer all his existing Yahoo mails into his new mailbox? Is that right?

 

[AndyP]

I have found a Yahoo community support forum and it seems the problem with outgoing mail is worldwide

For anyone else who has yahoo and may be interested:-
https://forums.yahoo.net/t5/Sending-and ... -receiving

Cant find any info from Yahoo.

I just have to use webmail for now.

 

[9fingers]

Yup. IMAP keeps your mail on the server and that has the advantage of being accessible from anywhere that you have internet access.

My mail also stays on the server so I can use webmail if out and about on other peoples computers etc but it is downloaded as well. So although the server is called pop.xxxx it seems to do what you describe as IMAP as well.

The difference maybe that looking on webmail, I don't see the replies I have made from home but not a problem for me as webmail is very much a once in a blue moon thing for me.

I've never been one to put mail in subject specific folders- too much risk something gets forgotten. Stuff like TWH2 reminders get deleted daily and other trivia too. "proper mail" is left in the folder and archived annually after a final tidy up to remove odd dross.
Currently have 3071 in this years mailbox which is still quite quick to sort/search on with seamonkeys tools. Obviously quicker in the early months of a new year.

I "think" Andy was asking about moving old mail stored on yahoo to be come old mail on a Gmail account.
and I can't see that being something they would want to support.

Bob

 

[RogerS]

.....
I "think" Andy was asking about moving old mail stored on yahoo to be come old mail on a Gmail account.
and I can't see that being something they would want to support.

Bob

If he wants to transfer old emails sitting in his Yahoo email account then I wonder if he couldn't just select them in groups of, say, 100 or so and simply forward them to his new email account ?

But lookie here https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140825 ... hard-drive ??

 

[AndyP]

As Bob predicted yahoo only acknowledged the problem as it was beginning to be solved. Can now send from all devices.

Interesting lesson on where to look first when things go wrong. I immediately thought it was at my end but could have prevented many frustrating hours if only I has searched Yahoo's community support forums first.

 

[Tusses]

glad it's working ..
I had nothing to offer ! .. don't use yahoo

but as an Off Topic ..
I did notice this thread was entirely green ! ..

until I've just spoiled it :lol:

 

[9fingers]

As Bob predicted yahoo only acknowledged the problem as it was beginning to be solved. Can now send from all devices.

Interesting lesson on where to look first when things go wrong. I immediately thought it was at my end but could have prevented many frustrating hours if only I has searched Yahoo's community support forums first.

The clue for me Andy was that each of your disparate range of devices stopped working and only in the up direction. Very unlikely to be a problem at your end.
Now to workout you strategy to ditch yahoo.
Bob

 

[AndyP]

Seems it IS possible to take all old email and contacts from Yahoo to Gmail. Forwarding can be left on for as long us necessary. I may have to test

In all honesty I cannot remember having this level of aggro with Yahoo before and the thought of changing my prime email address is scary.

 

[Tusses]

I've had plusnet as my main email for 17yrs .. I keep it Imap so I can read/reply from any device ..

every so often I download and delete from server to a hard drive. when it gets to a few '000 emails.

Never tried trying to download but not delete from server .. as I thought it would lead to duplicates , next time I download ?

in one form or another I have all my emails back to 94 ! :lol:

 

[AndyP]

I've only 10 years worth in the inbox and most could be deleted but that is not the main worry. It is finding all those people that I do not have in contacts but I still want mails from.

 

[TrimTheKing]

Okay, a number of things to address here...

The issue you had Andy was (I assume, but a very well educated assumption) lay with the yahoo SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server used by your various clients to send email. The reason webmail was affected, as Roger pointed out but didn't get quite right) is that your personal devices have a public facing SMTP server specified which your client contacts when it wants to send an email. When you are using webmail the webmail client will be using an internal or maybe just different SMTP server reserved for Yahoo webmail use.

Roger - your comment about using port 80 is (almost certainly) wrong. Andy would be connecting to the webmail site on port 80 (http) or 443 (https) so everything he writes in an email uses those protocols to get the signals from his client to the webmail server but the actual processing of sending that email will happen over port 25 (SMTP) at the back end just to different servers (presumably unaffected by this specific outage).

POP vs IMAP - very simplistically POP is one way communication (server down to client) and IMAP is 2 way. Basically with a POP service emails are sent down to your client and either deleted from the server or a copy left there depending on your choice of setting. If you delete an email from your local machine then that email is still stored on the server.

With IMAP your client talks back to the server so if you delete an email from your client it will (if you have chosen to set it up that way) also be deleted from the server. This is, from an Enterprise perspective at least, a much better solution because it means that you don't have people's mailboxes filling up with old emails that they think they deleted (which they did from their client but it stayed on the server).

WRT getting all your emails over to a new service, there are a number of tools that can do this for you that you will be able to google but my advice would be NOT to set a forwarder from the Yahoo account to your new one but to actually do what someone else suggested and gradually change the registered address for any subscription emails and then deal with emails from individuals or more sporadic senders as and when they come in so as to completely vacate that address. Then and only after you have done this to a degree where you are not receiving any emails to that account, would I put on a forwarder to catch any stragglers.

The reason for this is that should Yahoo suffer another outage or even decommission their service then you have a lot more work to do in one go and risk losing emails.

HTH, any questions please shout. I'm by no means an email SME but I know enough and have a team of people who are SME's who I can ask if need be

Cheers
Mark

 

[Woodbloke]

Get rid of Yahoo, close your email account(s) and open new ones with Apple ie, an icloud email address. We had similar issues with Virgin (incompatibility with the servers) and both now have Apple accounts. The really good thing is that all help via a 'phone call to the technoweenies for all Apple email accounts is FREE & GRATIS so any issues can be easily fixed by a 'phone call. Simples - Rob

 

[AndyP]

I am leaning that way Rob. I have gmail a couple of gmail accounts so can use them but Apple mail is another idea, thanks.

 

[RogerS]

Andy, I was faced with the same dilemma when the people who took over the Demon client base announced that they were going to be making a lot of changes that didn't appeal to me. So I opted to set up my own domain. I did exactly what Trim suggested and it was pretty painless.

I still have my old Demon email address and I don't pay a bean for it ! The only reason I'm keeping it open is that some people still seem to have the old historic Demon email address in their systems and so occasionally will send me emails to that address.

PayPal was the worst to change but I stuck up a How to do it on the PayPal forum.

 

[9fingers]

I am leaning that way Rob. I have gmail a couple of gmail accounts so can use them but Apple mail is another idea, thanks.

Might be worth checking to see if Apple will play nicely with non fruit phones first Andy
There does seem to be an inbuilt arrogance in some facets of Apple.
Just like the spell checker on the previous line forcing a capital A mid sentence!!

Bob

 

[Woodbloke]

I am leaning that way Rob. I have gmail a couple of gmail accounts so can use them but Apple mail is another idea, thanks.

There may have been an element of jest in my post Andy, but we really did have humungous problems with Virgin and the icloud accounts were dead easy to set up, 'cos the very nice Appley bloke on the end of the 'phone just talked me through it. They even do a screen sharing thingie now so they can see exactly what you see. It really was that simple and we've had no issues thus far - Rob

 

[RogerS]

......
Roger - your comment about using port 80 is (almost certainly) wrong. Andy would be connecting to the webmail site on port 80 (http)......
Mark

That's the port I was talking about.

 

[RogerS]

I am leaning that way Rob. I have gmail a couple of gmail accounts so can use them but Apple mail is another idea, thanks.

Might be worth checking to see if Apple will play nicely with non fruit phones first Andy
......

Bob

I don't think there's any problem.

 

[9fingers]

Thats Good Roger!
I've come across the Apple Vs Virgin thing with mail, I have to pass it though a Gmail account so they can't see each other.

Bob

 

[RogerS]

Thats Good Roger!
I've come across the Apple Vs Virgin thing with mail, I have to pass it though a Gmail account so they can't see each other.

Bob

Well, you know the old story about the Virgin and the Apple !