Suspicious activity has been detected on your account.

I sense, by the writing on the wall, that it's time to leave Yahoo mail. When a force bigger than yourself is unreasonable, you can either fight it or go with the flow, and when your agenda in life includes a lot more than, say, Yahoo mail, you're going to quietly flake out.

Quietly flaking out is important because the company is blind to it. You're not write that customer support letter you know they won't read or won't get to in time to change strategy. You won't provide feedback of any kind. You'll just walk away, leaving them with another spamtrap email address until they're able to time out the account nine months later.

Why would I flake out on Yahoo mail?


Typical Yahoo mail experience:

1. Write email reply to mailing list.
2. Get shifted to CAPTCHA screen
3. Enter CAPTCHA correctly
4. Receive this:



Your message was not sent

Suspicious activity has been detected on your account. To protect your account and our users, your message has not been sent.

If this error continues, please contact Yahoo! Customer Care for further help.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Thanks,

The Yahoo! Mail Team

Free Yahoo Error Generation Software


...and then, your back button is useless; your message is gone; a draft is not kept. If the system guessed correctly, great. Otherwise, they just raped you of your time because your message is permanently lost.


Add this to a list of other problems:

* Slow loading times
* Constant script screwups
* Incomplete and often simply broken software

It's brain-dead at its worst, which is what we all dislike about bureaucracies and large corporations and/or large social groups: they get so caught up in being themselves that they're oblivious to us as individuals, forcing us to either suck it up and humble ourselves excessively to be part of the cool, or retreat.

I had liked the idea of Yahoo and Yahoo mail, but now I'm just tired of this. The worst part is that the basic problem is Yahoo trying to imitate Gmail, and because of this their strategy varies from cloning Gmail features to implementing absolutely screwball ones of their own (replacing the "Compose Mail" button with a drop down menu). Like others, I will go on to gmail, fastmail.fm or another service that's less disorganized.

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