Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Yahoo! Mail - can it be saved?

It pains me to see Yahoo! becoming the butt of jokes in the start-up community, particularly as for so many of us they were an inspiration, once upon a time.  But, sadly, common wisdom round these parts is that they’re walking dead, losers, a place good companies go to die.  I sincerely hope they can claw back from that.

Like almost everyone who’s been online for more than a decade (two decades for me) I have a Yahoo! Mail account.  But I hate using it.  It stays alive as the repository for old messages I don’t want to lose and as a place where various signups and memberships still contact me.  Indeed I use it still as an address for signups I fear may be spammy.

I was wondering how Yahoo! Mail could win me back as a user.  It won’t replace GMAIL but maybe they could still be a genuine secondary mail account for me.  The conclusion I came to is simple.  If they provided a good tool to easily sort through and file old messages, weed out spam or unwanted membership communications, it could regain utility.  I don’t mean wading through page after page and trying to sort and select and delete.  There must be a better way to do that.

I cannot be the only person who looks at 17,000 unread emails and closes down again thinking it’s not worth fighting with.

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