Is Yahoo! Mail the least reliable free email on iOS?

[Eug]

My wife is complaining she hasn't been getting any email since yesterday on her iPhone 5. I just checked and the last time it sync'd was about 17 hours ago. It's set to push. I tried manually syncing and got nothing. I deleted her account and signed her in again, still nothing.

On my iPhone 5s, Yahoo has been alternating between 37 unread emails and 177 unread emails in my account, depending upon what the email gods are thinking at that time.

This is really frustrating. Both phones are iOS 8.1.2. Email works fine on her iPad 2, which is also iOS 8.1.2.

Do people get similar problems with Google mail on iOS? I don't want to use an iCloud account, since Apple is notoriously bad with this type of stuff too (eg. me.com).

 

[Printer Bandit]

http://www.itpro.co.uk/email-clients/23588/yahoo-mail-outage-engineers-still-trying-to-repair-cable

 

[JEDIYoda]

Why blame it on Yahoo mail? It could be the phone! My windows 6+ works great with yahoo mail!

 

[Eug]

Why blame it on Yahoo mail? It could be the phone! My windows 6+ works great with yahoo mail!

Two different iPhones. So it's either Yahoo! Mail or else iOS (8) or both. I've read some posts at the Apple forums which state that iOS 8 introduced these types of problems for a lot of people, although last year my wife had problems too for several days regardless of where she signed in from (OS X or iOS 7).

I just logged in from my Nexus 7, and my inbox says there's 173 messages unread, which is about right. My iPhone says 37 for the same account.

 

[debian0001]

Maybe you might be better off using the Yahoo Mail app. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/yahoo-mail-free-email-app/id577586159?mt=8

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Wife and I both have iPhone 5 from TMo. At lunch today I couldn't get any Internet even though I had a strong LTE signal. I toggled LTE mode, then Airplane mode. Nothing. Wife's phone, still on iOS6 (mine on 8). I power cycled and suddenly everything (Internet, SMS/iMessage) started working just fine.

I have a strong belief that iOS8 on iPhone5 is wonky. If I could rollback, I would.

 

[Rakehellion]

I got locked out of two of my Yahoo accounts, so I switched everything over to gmail.

 

[MotionMan]

I have a backup account on Yahoo!. It is set up on my two Macs and my iPhone 6. Almost daily it will go dead on all three devices, then, eventually come back to life.

It is the only one of my many accounts with different services that does that at all, let alone on a regular basis.

MotionMan

 

[gus6464]

The only good Yahoo product is Flickr. The rest are all heaping piles of dung.

 

[Ichinisan]

My sister's Yahoo mail / calendar would often stop synchronizing with her iPhone for no particular reason. No error message either. I remember that simply removing / re-adding the account did not always work. Super annoying because I never had that problem with Apple / Google / Microsoft services on iPhones.

 

[Ichinisan]

Wife and I both have iPhone 5 from TMo. At lunch today I couldn't get any Internet even though I had a strong LTE signal. I toggled LTE mode, then Airplane mode. Nothing. Wife's phone, still on iOS6 (mine on 8). I power cycled and suddenly everything (Internet, SMS/iMessage) started working just fine.

I have a strong belief that iOS8 on iPhone5 is wonky. If I could rollback, I would.

I've experienced that (rarely) on previous versions of iOS too.

 

[ultimatebob]

I know that GMail kinda sucks on iOS 8 as well. It no longer pushes updates, and you have to configure a fetch schedule for it instead.

 

[Eug]

Yeah, I reset the network settings, deleted her Yahoo account twice from the phone, and rebooted twice. Yahoo! Mail still doesn't work in Apple Mail.

I know that GMail kinda sucks on iOS 8 as well. It no longer pushes updates, and you have to configure a fetch schedule for it instead.

I was having this problem with Yahoo too last month. Then all of a sudden, push just started working again.

Maybe you might be better off using the Yahoo Mail app. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/yahoo-mail-free-email-app/id577586159?mt=8

I was using this on Android, but it looks like we'll have to do this on iOS as well. I've just installed this on both her iPhone and mine.

So far no issues, except that there's that stupid ad that looks like an email at the top of the screen. Does Yahoo! Mail really need to be adware? I'd pay a buck or two to get rid of the ad.

 

[JAG87]

Yahoo mail sucks big hairy donkey balls. No offence to anyone devout to it.

OP, I don't understand your objection to using iCloud email? Apple along with Microsoft are the only 2 of the big 3 software companies who actually do push notifications properly on Apple's native clients. Google was good but became crap once they dropped support for Exchange.

 

[Eug]

Well, first with iCloud, I'd have to use an iCloud account and change my email address which I've had for almost 20 years.

But also I somehow don't trust it. Apple has a long history of screwing this stuff up. .mac .me etc. Lots and lots of problems.

Push on Yahoo was working fine for me until last year.

 

[CZroe]

Wife and I both have iPhone 5 from TMo. At lunch today I couldn't get any Internet even though I had a strong LTE signal. I toggled LTE mode, then Airplane mode. Nothing. Wife's phone, still on iOS6 (mine on 8). I power cycled and suddenly everything (Internet, SMS/iMessage) started working just fine.

I have a strong belief that iOS8 on iPhone5 is wonky. If I could rollback, I would.

Couldn't set an alarm this morning with Siri on iOS8 on an iPhone 6 Plus because it was doing the exact same thing even on WIFI. It would just spin/process forever. I tried to load a webpage but got nothing. My brother's iPhone 6 Plus was working fine on the exact same services. Toggling Airplane mode did nothing. Rebooting the phone worked. By that time, half of my 10 minute snooze was gone. /FWP

 

[JAG87]

Well, first with iCloud, I'd have to use an iCloud account and change my email address which I've had for almost 20 years.

But also I somehow don't trust it. Apple has a long history of screwing this stuff up. .mac .me etc. Lots and lots of problems.

Push on Yahoo was working fine for me until last year.

Well that's a given... anytime you change provider you're giving up your address. But for me, using Yahoo mail would just not be an option. It doesn't work well enough with many email clients, at least by my standards.

I agree with you on Apple screwing this stuff up, they killed one of my aliases when my iCloud account got locked out, and I didn't find out until people told me their emails were bouncing back. I see where you are coming from, but apart from that, it's been pretty reliable for me.

 

[smackababy]

Is it me or does Eug and his wife have the most iPhone problems ever? Lol.

For what it's worth, the iOS email app does have some syncing problems for me at times. I have to restart me phone for it to sync properly. Not a huge deal, as it is my personal email I use for basically spam, but still kind of annoying. I have the GMail app for my professional email and that works like a charm.

 

[Eug]

Heh.

Well, it's just sad when Yahoo with Push worked fine on an iPhone 3G back in 2008 but it causes all sorts of problems in 2015 on an iPhone 5 & 5s.

 

[Bill Brasky]

It's funny that so many people hate on hotmail/outlook mail, but it's been crazy reliable for YEARS. I also have a gmail account, but it's not my primary.

 

[Ichinisan]

Well, first with iCloud, I'd have to use an iCloud account and change my email address which I've had for almost 20 years.

But also I somehow don't trust it. Apple has a long history of screwing this stuff up. .mac .me etc. Lots and lots of problems.

Push on Yahoo was working fine for me until last year.

Yahoo also has a long history of email / account security issues.

 

[Eug]

No, Yahoo is most definitely not perfect. However, my point was there was no point to switch from a problematic email provider to another problematic email provider.

 

[Ichinisan]

It's funny that so many people hate on hotmail/outlook mail, but it's been crazy reliable for YEARS. I also have a gmail account, but it's not my primary.

I was forced to leave Hotmail for Gmail because there has always been a problem affecting a significant amount of Hotmail accounts -- but not all Hotmail accounts are affected.

Basically, a large portion of mail simply never arrives. I'm not talking about POP clients deleting messages. I'm not talking about legitimate mail being sorted as "Junk." It just doesn't arrive at all. That includes a lot of activation emails from web forums.

I think I dealt with that for over a decade. Early on, I always blamed the systems that claimed to have sent the missing confirmation messages. I eventually figured out, without any doubt, that Hotmail was responsible. Microsoft / Hotmail support was no help whatsoever. Jumped ship to Gmail and never looked back.

I absolutely love how Gmail handles messages by grouping them into conversations. When I delete a conversation, all the messages in that conversation are deleted and I don't have to look through 5 folders to find the related messages.

I love how folders are really "labels," so I can mark the conversation / messages and have it show up in multiple places.

I absolutely love the instant search and the awesome flexible search syntax.

I even love the intuitive keyboard shortcuts (enable in Gmail settings) for mail handling. The most important functions (archive, delete) can be done with my left hand on the keyboard and my right hand on the mouse.

 

[Eug]

I absolutely love how Gmail handles messages by grouping them into conversations. When I delete a conversation, all the messages in that conversation are deleted and I don't have to look through 5 folders to find the related messages.

This is actually a very common feature. In fact, most of the better email applications these days support this, regardless of the email service provider.

My problem right now with the Yahoo Mail app on iOS is I can't figure out how to turn this feature off, if possible at all. My wife much prefers having individual emails. She doesn't like the grouping by threads/conversations.

 

[ultimatebob]

Yahoo mail sucks big hairy donkey balls. No offence to anyone devout to it.

OP, I don't understand your objection to using iCloud email? Apple along with Microsoft are the only 2 of the big 3 software companies who actually do push notifications properly on Apple's native clients. Google was good but became crap once they dropped support for Exchange.

I use Windows and Linux systems as well, and I don't want my e-mail viewing habits to get stuck in Apple's walled garden. I doubt that Apple gives a damn what their webmail looks like on non Apple platforms.