The New Super-Annoying Yahoo E-Mail Interface -- and Can We Get Rid of Yahoo Messenger Spam

The new Yahoo interface is so annoying and so counterintuitive and just so awful that it might actually drive me to gmail.com

Yahoo mail is now down so frequently that I may be forced to go to gmail just for that reason. Yahoo really seems to be in trouble.

THE most annoying feature is that backspace no longer works to take you back to the previous page of your *email itself*. Instead, it takes you OUT of Yahoo email completely back to your home page or previous page, forcing you to go back inside of Yahoo, sometimes having to re-log in. This is the SINGLE MOST ANNOYING THING I've seen in software in a long time, outside of Viewer 2.x and 3 in Second Life.  It means that you can no longer cruise through your email when you use search terms, but have to keep closing each open email tab.

That same tabification of the email that wasn't there before means every single draft you make has to be first closed as a tab before you can delete it, meaning the danger of drafts accidentally getting sent increases, or just clutter piles up.

The graphics on the interface could not be more awful. The little icon that is meant to stand for "folders" is shaped so that it looks like a trash can, and even has an arrow on it that makes you think "throw out". Then the icon that looks like a folder is actually something useless called "Switch View" between classic which is NOT the old graphics of the entire interface which was better, but merely "whole page" or "scroll" for your email list, which you won't use.

There's no "select all" so that you have to "just know" that you have to click the box in the upper left corner under FROM to "select all" and hope to delete all the mails page by page.

Now you're wondering: how to get rid of that UBER ANNOYING Yahoo Messenger -- the one inside your email now, not the separate application you used to download separately like AIM.

You don't WANT your email to be a social media tool and a chat box but it is now FORCED on you. This is the most disturbing aspect of this whole Yahoo socialization -- you don't it and can't opt out. I know lots of people who just want Yahoo email to stay email, and go on other things from Facebook to Meebo to Twitter to socialize. But Yahoo wants to grab you and rope you into its own internal social media world to scrape more data from you. Understood -- you're getting the service for free. But seriously, could I pay you $9.95 a month just to get rid of all this crap, put the interface back, make it work, and keep the goddamn messenging shit out of the view?

There isn't a soul I know on Yahoo mail, i.e. in my mail list, with whom I wish to "chat" rather than send email, or visa versa. P.S. I also don't want to know what silly things they are writing in the comments of newspaper forums. Somehow, I found not only that happening, but relatives I know told me they were getting my newspaper forum comments and bewildered. We were somehow "signed up for" some social junk and it took some toggling to get it all turned off.

Not so Yahoo Messenger. You cannot remove it. You cannot shut it down completely. You can only put yourself as "hide" on it, and then that doesn't work to get rid of spammers, who try random addresses.

I found that due to a bug in the system or something paralyzing it, when I went to MAIL/OPTIONS/MESSAGES it simply refused to move or toggle, as if it were frozen.

You can find MAIL/OPTIONS at the top left of the page, about a third of the way in from where your name and "sign out" are.

I kept trying this over and over, relogging, refreshing -- stuck. And without the ability to select "block" on the spam messages bombarding me, I couldn't shut them off. Making "hide" didn't work; trying to get "options" to work didn't "take".

I read on a forum that if you have spam, you have been "hacked" and should change your password. This seemed nuts to me because I don't believe I was "hacked" socially or technologically, these spam messages just came from random people randomly going through names. But I decided to try changing my password anyway.

I changed my password, logged back on, and the damn spam messages were still coming in. It wasn't about them having taken over my account; it was the random factor. But, intriguingly, after changing my password, suddenly the MAIL/OPTIONS was now unfrozen and I could then select "block" by name, and type in the name of the spammer.

I don't know if this actually correlated, but it appeared to. I can't explain it. I can only report it and suggest it be tried.

I also found that trying to select "block all but my contacts" *did not work* to get rid of the spammer. It had to be blocked by name.

So I've finally gotten rid of the annoying spammers who were opening up tab after tab and driving me nuts because I unfroze the menu. That may be coincidental. But the interface continues to so annoy even after weeks of adjusting that email has become a horror for me. I hate gmail's interface and find it constantly counterintuitive, too -- I would hate to move to it but Yahoo is now down so much and has this dinky confusing interface where the folder looks like trash and you keep completely logging out just by back spacking, that I may be forced.

 

Comments

[ELQ]

If you use Firefox, you might try using the add-on "Adblock Plus". Right-click the messenger and choose Block and it will give you a list of url options to block the content coming from that particular url. I've found it very useful for blocking all sorts of social craziness instead of ads because it will block anything you tell it to block.

[D]

Except that if you're using FireFox with AdBlock Plus installed and you right-click on the Messenger icon in the Yahoo email interface, you don't see a "Block Option". If you right-click on the Adblock Plus toolbar icon, you don't see a "Block" option there, either. Instead, you see an option to "Open all blockable items" and you get a long list of hashed URLs for every link on the page. Good luck figuring out which one(s) you have to block to keep Messenger from running. Too bad the previous poster didn't include useful setp-by-step instructions, example URLs, or anything relevant at all to this problem.