Bring Back the Old Yahoo Mail

Yahoo recently introduced New Yahoo Mail. Normally I try to avoid making negative remarks on this blog, but I feel that there are 3 major changes in the new version of Yahoo Mail that make it worse, not better.

First, space utilization is poor. In the image above, you can see how each message consumes far too much vertical real estate, thereby limiting how many messages can be viewed on the screen. This applies to both the desktop/laptove and iOS mobile versions of Yahoo Mail. Disabling message previews helps a little bit, but there is still a lot of wasted screen real estate. And those silly icons next to the sender names? No thank you. Exactly what purpose do they serve? Recommendations to Yahoo: Give users the ability to toggle between the current view and a compact view of email messages. Also give users the ability to show or hide the icons.

Example #1 of a useless AI-generated email summary

Example #2 of a useless AI-generated email summary

Second, Yahoo Mail introduces AI-generated email summaries. Again, no thank you. I know how to read, and I don’t need Yahoo Mail to summarize things for me. Everyone is trying to add LLM features to their products for the sake of adding LLM features, rather than solving real problems. When I see the AI summaries such as the 2 examples above, I am reminded of a humorous Reddit post. Recommendation to Yahoo: Give users the option to show or hide the AI-generated summaries.

Third, the new folder structure is confusing. I have some custom folders where I store emails of various topics. However, the Archive, Spam, and Trash folders have been moved to a new location that can be displayed by clicking on the 3-dot icon. This is something that I will probably eventually get used to, but for now I have been repeatedly been clicking on the “Folders” icon to look for the Archive, Spam, and Trash folders, only to be reminded that I have to click elsewhere. Recommendation to Yahoo: If something is not broken, don’t try to fix it.

Overall, I do appreciate having a free email service, and even though I think the new New Yahoo Mail is a downgrade, it is probably not as horrible as I might have made it seem. Maybe I’ve reacted negatively because change can be hard sometimes, but there is really nothing about the New Yahoo Mail that I see as a positive change. I wonder how others feel about the New Yahoo Mail—am I overreacting?

Flight Delay Notifications

It seems that most airline passengers nowadays are receiving electronic flight notifications via email and/or text messages. Today I was waiting at LAX for an American Airlines flight to Orlando and received a series of flight delay notifications via email (example above) text messages:

As I sat for an extra 2 hours at the gate waiting to board the plane, each time I received a flight delay notification via text message, I could hear a collective groan from the other passengers who had received notifications at the same time. The groans grew louder with each successive delay. Fortunately I eventually made it to my destination, but I thought it was funny that we were all sharing the bad news in synchrony. As the saying goes, misery loves company.

Data Breaches and Pwnage

The other day, I received an email from Spirit Airlines. Here's the body of the message:

Unfortunately I was not surprised at all when I read this message because I had been previously notified by 2 different academic institutions on separate occasions that their systems were breached, and my personal information was among the stolen records. Still, it was nice of Spirit Airlines to notify me.

To corroborate what I already knew, I visited Have I been pwned? which is a web site that tells you if you have an email address that has been compromised in a data breach. Of course, you should be cautious about submitting your email address to a web site that you don't trust, but if it makes you feel more secure, this site is trusted by the Wall Street Journal (subscription required to read the full article, but the video is free) because of its transparent practices.

In case you're wondering, here's more info about the origin of the word pwned. Have you been pwned?

Yahoo Mail - Abuse Prevention vs. Usability

Yahoo Mail is a free email service which I like primarily for its 1 TB of storage capacity. I'm generally satisfied with Yahoo Mail--its ads are not too obtrusive, there are keyboard shortcuts to perform common actions like archiving emails, and its spam filter does a pretty good job (sometimes "a little too well" but that's another story). However, sometimes Yahoo Mail borders on annoying, and here is an example. Sometimes I come across an interesting story or video that I don't have time to read/watch at the moment, so I send myself the URL for future reference. When I use Yahoo Mail to send the URL, I get this message:

This occurs when the body contains only a URL, regardless of whether the subject line is populated. It doesn't occur every time I send just a URL, and I don't know how to predict when it will occur. I  do appreciate Yahoo's efforts to prevent spam, but when preventive efforts impede regular non-abusive users from doing what they want to do, that's when usability has been compromised.

I realize that there are many examples of when the masses are inconvenienced to screen for a small minority of offenders. Airport security checkpoints and border inspections come to mind. But is the presence of spam email enough justification to disallow sending of URLs via email where there are a multitude of ways that email can be used to send spam and commit more serious forms of abuse? How about if emails were intercepted only if the URLs had a poor Web of Trust reputation or if the URL had been associated with phishing attempts for the purpose of identity theft?

With Yahoo Mail's current implementation of abuse prevention, a spammer simply needs to add some text in addition to the URL in the body of the email, and presto--Yahoo's preventive measures are bypassed. Surely there must be a better way to fight spam?