mail Archive

I am a happy Yahoo Mail user. I’ve been a Yahoo Mail user since the early days. I also know that I am a bad tech blogger and early adopter because I don’t use (and make love to) Gmail. I regularly get noogies at tech conferences when others learn about my choice.

Lately I’ve noticed issues with email delivery to my Yahoo Mail account. Sometimes emails are delivered on time, but many are delivered late. And the delayed delivery seems to vary – I can’t put my finger on it. Even the exact same email can be delivered in real-time on one test but another test takes half a day to arrive.  At first I thought it was only emails coming from Rackspace servers as they noted there was an issue a couple of weeks ago with mail delivery. But this past week, the delayed email delivery seems to be coming from all sides.

One interesting note – mail that gets forwarded from my gMail account always seems to come immediately. The same message sent directly to my Yahoo Mail account sometimes is delayed.

Yesterday it caused an issue as newer emails showed up before the previous emails which made for a very odd exchange with a client.

Do you use Yahoo Mail? If so, have you noticed any delivery delays over the past few weeks?

PO Box and mail forwarding service Earth Class Mail has announced a new partnership today with check processor Bank Serv. The new partnership will allow Earth Class Mail customers to have checks deposited electronically and automatically when checks arrive in their mailbox. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

The electronic check deposit program is available on the Professional account which is priced at $39.95/month. The check deposit service is an additional $35 a month and each processed check costs $2. The cost per processed check goes down the more checks you process per month. While I haven’t done the math, you would need a good number of checks (or a few very large checks) to make the service cost effective.

Earth Class Mail staff, including founder and Chairman Ron Wiener, were part of a video series called “Startup Junkies” which you can watch on Hulu. I think the series is well worth watching if you run a startup as they take you through some of the thoughts around VC funding, team building, development, leadership, office locations, expanding, purchasing capital machinery and marketing. Interestingly it seems most of the people in the video are no longer listed on the executive team page. Also keep in mind that the series was produced for television. I’ve embedded the first episode below.

In other Earth Class Mail news, the Portland Business Journal is reporting Sarah Carr has been named as the new CEO.

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NY-based file sharing service Drop.io has announced a new partnership with Yahoo today. The partnership brings a new application named “Attach Large Files” directly as part of the applications menu within Yahoo Mail.

When you want to attach a file up to 100mb to a Yahoo email, the Attach Large File app creates a drop.io share, uploads the file to it, and attaches a link to the drop.io share inside of the email. In my testing, the application worked well.

The drop.io team notes that the app was built on top of the drop.io API. The app is a default and is available directly in the “applications” menu inside of Yahoo Mail. While I don’t see using the service for uploading a simple image or Word doc, for larger videos or photos it could work very well. And the offering should provide more visibility for drop.io to a mainstream audience.

Here’s a video overview of how the Attach Large Files application works:
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I’ve been a happy Yahoo Mail user forever and to the best of my memory, I don’t ever remember the service being down. As of 7pm Eastern this evening, Yahoo Mail has not been functioning. The few times that I’ve received an error, a simple browser refresh fixes the issue – but not this time. The error message remains even when switching over to the very old “classic” version of Yahoo Mail.

There are lots of people on Twitter who have also had issues accessing the mail service.

As always, please report in if Yahoo Mail is down for you.

Update: 7:45pm – it appears Yahoo Mail is back to normal.

This afternoon at SXSW I was able to grab a couple of minutes with Mark Schmulen. Mark is one of the co-founders of NutshellMail. Here’s their company overview, "NutshellMail transforms your primary email account into a universal inbox so you can retrieve messages and manage all your accounts in one place. NutshellMail was also designed to enable employees, restricted from third-party messaging accounts, to securely access personal messages at work without violating their employer’s IT policies."

Check out my NutshellMail demo with Mark:

Slovenia-based Zemanta has announced a variety of important product updates today. Zemanta provides a set of content tools which help bloggers "enhance" their posts. They have updated their widget to offer support for video, audio and Web apps including Google Maps. Zemanta has also created "content verticals" in categories including: music, tech, health and travel. The idea of the verticals is to have a set of content sources on hand for each content category.

The other update is a major update for Zemanta. The widget they offer to bloggers will now be available to Yahoo Mail and Google Gmail users. The widget is installed as a toolbar for Firefox. Once the toolbar is activated, Zemanta users can enhance their emails by adding images and links, similar to the blogging product. The company also notes that you can create "postcards" which can be personalized and sent via your email provider. It’s a very interesting extension to writing emails although I wonder how often a person will want to enhance their emails.

One interesting thing I’ve noted with Zemanta is just how many juicy SEO links they push out to sites like Wikipedia and Crunchbase. When a person picks an image for a company, Zemanta drops the image into the post, links to Crunchbase below the image and links the image (with a follow tag) to the page that the image references. In fact, I’ve wondered if Crunchbase would rank so high for company searches if it wasn’t for Zemanta.

Maybe there’s a business model in the links. For example, Crunchbase could pay Zemanta a fee each time their links are displayed on a user’s post. Maybe the user who initiated the link gets a cut of the fee. Of course that would just mean that Crunchbase (and the others) are paying for in-text linking which could easily be gamed and is against Google’s TOS, but perhaps it’s an idea that could spark other revenue ideas for the company.

Perhaps the better idea is to allow the content sources to bid on placement in the widget for each keyword. The more you bid, the higher you are listed on the source list.

Day #3 in the Holiday Gifts Giveaway goes to the Peek email device. Here’s an overview provided by the company along with their offer to the CN readers.

Peek is one of the hottest new products of 2008. It is a super simple and stylish mobile email and texting device that makes it easy to stay connected with your family and friends on-the-go. No contracts. 1 minute to set-up. Very affordable – Peek retails for $99.95 (+$19.95 per month for unlimited email and texting).

The company is offering 15% off the device when you purchase it via getpeek.com. Enter code FVDVMAUJCX during checkout.

Editor’s note: This post is part of our Holiday Gifts series. The company listed didn’t pay CN for the listing. The content above was provided by the company.