mail Archive

It seems that Yahoo Mail is currently down and/or not functioning properly. I haven’t been able to get into my account for about 15 minutes as of the time of this post. The issues appear to have started about 30 minutes ago. Yahoo is flat in early morning trading.

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

Update 11:05AM – I am also now seeing the following error message: internal error – server connection terminated

Some of the time I attempt to load Yahoo Mail, I receive the following error message, while other times, it is just a simple “Connection Timed Out” message.

We’re experiencing some technical difficulties…

We’re sorry, but Yahoo! Mail can’t load due to a temporary error. You can try back again shortly, or visit our help pages for ways to troubleshoot the issue.

Try again
Visit Help for troubleshooting instructions

Temporary error: 14

As always, please report in if Yahoo Mail is down for you – include your location as well.

It seems platform funds are launching all over the place these days. Three years ago (boy it seems like yesterday) Facebook launched their fbFund. Most recently communications platform Twilio announced a $250,000 Twilio Fund for startups that build upon their platform. Last month Dave McClure’s 500Startups launched the CrowdFlower $250,000 CrowdFlower microfund.

Email platform provider MailChimp has announced the launch of their “integration fund” today. The fund will offer a total of $1 million to startups who build applications on top of the MailChimp platform. Unlike most of the other platform funds, MailChimp says they won’t take any equity. For example, both the CrowdFlower and Twilio funds take 1% equity for an up-to $10,000 investment. There is no mention on the MailChimp fund overview regarding the maximum amount each startup can receive.

The announcement blog post is well worth a read even if you aren’t going to participate in the fund.  MailChimp co-founder and CEO Ben Chestnut discusses how MailChimp grew and why they want to help other companies build towards their own growth. Ben notes that the best marketing vehicle for MailChimp was (and is) the launch of their API. He suggests you build one for your startup and then leverage other APIs for growth. I’ve often said that leveraging others technology is smart — the mistake is building solely upon another companies technology.

If you are interested in obtaining some of the funds, you can complete the application here.

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.

Continue reading “Earth Class Mail Partners With Bank Serv for Electronic Check Deposits” »

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:
Continue reading “Drop.io Launches “Attach Large Files” on Yahoo Mail” »

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: