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Comment by aceperry | Hacker News Reader

I hope yahoo mail sticks around. I've been using it since forever, and would hate to change to gmail. Yahoo mail is kind of slow, but gets the job done, gmail is too chaotic for me. Maybe I'm old school about that, but I'm all in on yahoo mail.

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I didn't believe you that Gmail was more chaotic than Yahoo, so I signed into my never-used yahoo account.

The Yahoo Mail interface is much cleaner than I remember, though I don't enjoy the purple theme, the loading times, and the persistent "Try Firefox" banner in the top right.

Plus my mailbox is full of spam from Yahoo itself, like weekly emails from Yahoo Movies.

>the persistent "Try Firefox" banner in the top right

We, non-Chrome users, hate persistent "try Google Chrome" banners on every Google property too.

yahoo mail is incredibly valuable -- it's a feeder (clicks and identity) to all of their content sites. It's really one of yahoo's gems. The new owner will probably take better care of it than yahoo did.

That was my take and when Mayer took over I was hopeful she'd sink some resources into the servers and fix the performance issue. Nope. Its as bad and slow as ever, all my clients that use it complain but there is nothing I could do save moving them to gmail. This was a major misstep in my opinion as Yahoo mail is the company "face" to many users. The Yahoo home page was horrible when she took over but at least she had the sense to put an end to the zooming cars and flying coke cans & etc that marred the user experience. Unfortunately, the home page news links have deteriorated to People Magazine level of coverage which has also hurt their brand. Want to know what the Kadashians are up to, the latest Taytay breakup new? Go to Yahoo.

Mail is and has certainly been a priority at Yahoo. All employees have to dogfood it. Ads are included in corp mail and POP3/IMAP access is disabled. You have to use the web and mobile clients.

When layoffs were announced Mail was spared and actually grew.

I don't know why it hasn't improved. It's not for lack of trying.

> Ads are included in corp mail and POP3/IMAP access is disabled. You have to use the web and mobile clients.

Ah, that's why Yahoo has gone to hell — emacs users don't stay with the company. You see, emacs has 8 different mail clients: rmail, gnus, mh-e, wanderlust, mew, vm, notmuch & mu4e — and no true emacs user (not to be confused with no true Scotsman …) would want to read email in anything but his favourite text editor.

The other alternative (and it scares me too!) is that Kardashians gossip was carefully measured to actually be what the most people respond to...

Yes, scary. And given Mayer's penchant for numbers your suspicion is almost certainly the case. It reminds me of Henry Ford saying "If I asked people what they wanted they'd say a faster horse". Mayer was suppose to lead the company not be a poll-following huckster.

Being a visionary takes a lot, lot more guts and risk-taking than people tend to think. It's not clear what the Yahoo board wanted in its CEO. Perhaps the board had mostly given up on Yahoo reclaiming its branding status in higher value markets and just wanted a way to stabilize stock prices before selling and making it an attractive acquisition target. We really don't know as outsiders.

> US telecoms giant Verizon Communications is to buy Yahoo's search and advertising operations for $5bn (£3.8bn), according to media reports.

I don't believe that encompasses Mail.

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