Saturday, April 05, 2008

Yahoo Mail acting up: Error Code 5

I've been a Yahoo! Mail customer for years... probably as long as they actually had an email product.... Heck a few years ago, I even decided it was time to upgrade to Yahoo! Mail Plus.... again in support of a great product. But recently, coincidentally around the same time that Microsoft announce they buy out bid for Yahoo, my mail has been acting like shit. If I'm lucky, I can actually access my email 1 a week without getting this stupid 'Error Code 5' crap. If I could actually access my email I'd post a copy of the responses I've received when I've contacted them.

This is actually the full message I see when I try to long into my mail:

You've stumbled upon a temporary problem we're having with Yahoo! Mail. Usually this problem gets resolved quickly, without you doing a thing. In fact it may be taken care of now.

  • Try pressing the Reload or Refresh button on your browser, or logging out then back into your Yahoo! account. Hopefully that will take care of things.

If that doesn't fix the problem, please be patient while we sort it out and try again shortly. The fact that you're reading this page means we've been automatically notified of the issue, and chances are we're working on it now.

  • If you think you've been more than patient and tried the tricks above, feel free to contact Customer Care about Error Code 5.

Thanks,

The Yahoo! Mail Team

Sorry for the inconvenience.
You know temporary issues only last for a short time, and they should be happening every day for weeks at a time. From what I remember of the responses I've received from my contacting customer support, basically they said that it is typically caused because of an external reader issue, and that basically I must be accessing the email from either 2 computers or the Web and a client at the same time... okay then what is the point of offering POP access for plus members??? I use the POP support to check my email from my PalmOS Treo. Anyways... just to humor them, I disabled mail from my phone about a week and a half ago (mind you, I've been using a mail client on my phone for over 6months...), and the problem still remains..... well Yahoo! get your act together or I'm out of here.... you are quickly loosing a customer that has supported you for years....

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm having the same Error code 5 problem. Normally it gets sorted out within minutes. But on this occasion it is persisting. I shut down my computer and restarted it. Didn't work. I restarted my computer. Didn't work. I'm not all that savy with the computer and it is terribly frustrating!

Anonymous said...

This Error Code 5 problem is very frustrating to people like me who are not all that savy with the computer. What do I do?

Unknown said...

Yeah, I have been a LONG TIME Yahoo email user and my email address is wired into most of what I do, i.e., the sites that use your email address as a user id. Using another provider will be a major pain for me but I've already started the process. Argh!!!

I started having these problems around the Microsoft business as well. I get the run around by their support people. I'm on a Linux system, they don't support Linux. I have this problem on multiple versions of Linux and multiple versions and browsers. Some times it does go away but now it's more like a permanent feature. If it really is a server down problems, I'm REALLY surprised that they don't have a fail over server in place. Whatever happened to guaranteed services?

I run mtr against my mail server and see a > 80% packet loss. Either they're blocking ICMP or there is a REAL problem there. I'd love to fix it for them but they'd have to pay me. Sigh.