Problems with yahoo…
So I had some problems with yahoo. They were providing me with email and webhosting for my business website, pdcmanagement.com. Last week the email address stopped working and the website went down. I tried to change my password online because I had just recently changed the security questions, at Yahoo’s prompting. That didn’t work, they gave me a message that I my password could not be reset online and I would have to talk to Yahoo customer support.
I sent an email to customer support, a day later they sent me a response saying that I should check out the FAQ or reset my password online. I sent them another email explaining that I had done this and it was not working, so after another two days they sent me another email with a support phone number. I called the phone number, I got to talk to “Seth”. Seth was as helpful as he could be, but didn’t know a whole lot.
Seth asked me a whole raft of security questions to verify that I was who I say that I was. I think their are eight questions total, all of which I answered correctly. Seth then informed me that my account had been deactivated due to abuse of the terms of service. When I asked Seth exactly what the abuse of the terms of service were he said that he did not have that information but if I wanted I could check out the terms of service link at the bottom of any Yahoo.com website, read section 6, and if I do not agree that I was violating any of the terms of service I could send an email to the abuse department.
I read the terms of service, I found nothing there that I was violating. The website in question had the most basic and harmless content available, I cannot imagine what they thought I was doing wrong. So I went to “abuse.yahoo.com” as directed by Seth. Guess what? There was no email address or contact form associated with this, no “Contact Yahoo! Abuse”.
I decided to send abuse reports about myself, to see if I could get any response. I sent them to hosting abuse, mail abuse, small business account abuse, etc. The only one that I got a response back from was mail abuse, which told me that I should read the terms of service, section 6, and if I don’t agree that I was in violation of the terms of service I should contact the abuse department.
Meanwhile, I have no email. At least no email that anyone knows. Also I had foolishly relied on Yahoo to maintain my address book for me because they do such a wonderful job of it and I was paying them and for Pete’s sake I never do anything to abuse the terms of service. I started complaining to Hans at CyberXHosting who is a good friend of mine and has been hosting Life In Playa since its inception. Hans suggested that I host with them, I was pretty upset, so I changed the domain name server information on my domain that night and by the next day I had my domain back.
Other people had email accounts with my pdcmanagement.com account, all hosted through yahoo. I went about setting up their emails on the new server, I set them up and then sent out the account information to the alternate email addresses that I had for these people.
I started getting bounce notifications, this yahoo email and that yahoo email and this email that isn’t yahoo but they host it, all of them bouncing. Yahoo notifies me that there is a permanent delivery failure, code 554. Again I was complaining to Hans about this and he went to the yahoo site to look up code 554:
There is something about the message contents that Yahoo! Mail will not accept for policy reasons. For instance, it is against Yahoo! Mail’s policy to send phishing/fraud attempts or viruses. If you feel you have received this error for a message that should be accepted, we encourage you to provide us with detailed information about the rejected message.
**A little aside, at no point on this page does yahoo have any sort of way to provide them with detailed information about the rejected message**
So, today, after wading through all that, I finally got all my email addresses setup. The webpage is up but I am redoing it so it isn’t much to look at yet. I got an email from yahoo! A response to one of my abuse reports. I will leave out most of the stuff because it isn’t important, but the last part of the email really got me:
Please note that due to privacy concerns, Yahoo! does not maintain
backups of customer’s mailboxes. Should you be approved for
reactivation, we should be able to recover your web hosting and database
files, but we will not be able to recover mailboxes lost in this
process.
I guess I don’t need to talk to yahoo any more, since the only part of this whole interaction that interested me was the recovery of my contact and email.
So, I really have to look at all this like a learning experience. Backup everything! You get what you pay for! If you have been trying to get in touch with me at the old email address, now you know why it has been bouncing. Please contact me through the blog, or facebook, or one of the various other ways out there so I can get you the new email address.