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.

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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.

Find more stories about: email, mail, MailChimp, startups, Venture Capital

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?

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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.

Find more stories about: Earth Class Mail, mail, money

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:

Related: Three alternatives to WebEx

Find more stories about: Drop.io, email, mail, nextNY, NYC, yahoo

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.

Find more stories about: email, mail, yahoo

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:

Find more stories about: Conferences, email, mail, NutshellMail, Quick News, Reviews, startups, sxsw, Video, videos

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.

Find more stories about: email, Europe, mail, Quick News, Zemanta

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.

Find more stories about: email, holiday gifts, mail, Peek, Quick News

Yahoo’s Zimbra email product offering has announced this morning that their Collaboration Suite is now available to educational institutions using the Zimbra Hosted platform. Basically the Zimbra Hosted platform puts the Collaboration Suite into the cloud and removes the need for local server hosting.

Zimbra Hosted utilizes Yahoo!’s worldwide infrastructure and provides customers with 99.9 percent guaranteed uptime, 24/7 support and built-in disaster recovery service level agreements (SLA). Pricing is still based on number of mailboxes and selected features. The company says they offer discounts for educational institutions.

Zimbra already has 400+ educational institutions using their Collaboration Suite locally. You can check out the full feature list here. A big difference from the crappy web-only email client we used when I completed my MBA in 2005.

Find more stories about: email, gigaomnews, mail, Quick News, schools, Zimbra

One of the companies I met this past week was OtherInbox. OtherInbox is a mail management tool whereby it allows you to give out anything@domain.com and it automatically routes it to a newly-created mailbox. This allows you to give out macys@ for Macy’s, contest1@ for a contest and so on. It is one of the most useful tools I’ve seen in recent months. Check out reviews on CNET, Download Squad, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb.

Here’s my interview with Josh Baer, OtherInbox founder. If you’d like an invite, go to: http://beta.otherinbox.com/signup/centernetworks

Find more stories about: email, gmail, mail, OtherInbox, Quick News, Video

Yakov is reporting that Digital Sky Technologies has obtained an additional 15% stake in Mail.ru from Tiger Global Management for $180-200 million. This moves Digital Sky Technologies’ into the majority stakeholder position with 50.6%. Yakov also notes, "It’s also reported that DST could be selling a controlling stake in itself to Alisher Usmanov, founder of Metalloinvest and owner of Kommersant publishing house. Kommersant recently merged its online newspaper Gazeta.ru into LiveJournal’s owner SUP."

Mail.ru has 6.2 million daily visitors and 14.7 million monthly visitors and one of the stakeholders reported income of $56 million for year 2007. DST’s assets range somewhere between $1.1 billion and $3 billion.

Mail.ru was voted one of the top Web sites in Russia earlier this year.

Find more stories about: acquisitions, email, mail, Quick News, Quintura, Russia

Today at MIX08, AOL previewed the latest version of AOL Mail which is enhanced with Silverlight technology. The preview also showed the usage of a "skin" on the AOL Mail client — check it out below. The company claims that this new version will offer a rich web experience in a desktop portable client.

Will this new AOL Mail version replace the mail inside of the full AOL client software? I sure hope so as the Web version seems sleeker and easier to use than the desktop client version.

Find more stories about: AOL, email, mail, Quick News

Zimbra is probably one of the few companies that are creating innovation and are cranking out a great product but aren’t heard from often. Zimbra was acquired by Yahoo last September for $350 million.

Yesterday I spoke with marketing VP John Robb about their progress and to discuss their latest product: Zimbra Desktop. When I used the word transparent in the title of this column, it’s because no matter what device (computer, mobile, desktop, Web) you use Zimbra with, the experience is as close to identical as possible.

Robb says that Zimbra has 20,000 enterprise customers and over 11 million network mailboxes not including Comcast.

We mainly spoke about the new desktop client which is built on top of Mozilla’s Prism service. I’ve been playing with it yesterday and today and it’s very slick. Frankly, it puts traditional desktop email clients to shame. There are some ties back to Yahoo for search and Robb says this is one of their monetization strategies. The majority of their revenue comes from the enterprise customers. I’ve posted a screenshot of the desktop client below which shows how it has a similar feel to Outlook and is more Webified by using Yahoo services where possible.

The Zimbra Desktop works with pop/imap/etc so you can use it with your ISP email. And making it even stronger, you can download add-ons called "Zimlets". Robb notes that the Zimbra Desktop is a competitor to Thunderbird, Entourage, Outlook and Eudora.

If the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo goes through, could Zimbra become the new Outlook Express inside Windows?

Find more stories about: email, Insights, mail, Zimbra

TechCrunch is reporting that Yahoo will announce in the coming days that they have removed all caps on storage within Yahoo Mail. Currently Gmail caps storage at 2.8 gig.  Mike notes, "I spoke with Yahoo’s Vice President of Mail, John Kremer, this afternoon about the announcement. He says the new storage limits (or rather lack of a limit) affect all Yahoo mail users, not just users of the new beta product.

"Users are subject to Yahoo’s abuse policies, which requires users to follow “normal email practices” and not engage in activities like using Yahoo mail for basic online storage (a number of services have popped up to help people use Gmail for this purpose)."

So basically they are saying, "You can store as much mail as you want, but you can't store files." So for example, each morning I have my server email me a backup file (about 10mb), can I store 500 of these? 1000 of these? Or do these count as "online storage" ?

The Yahoo blog is clear; it is for "email message storage" — so I guess my backup files should be fine. Don't expect to use it as a FTP site for your Lindsay Lohan pics or weemee icons.

Also, as we have learned so many times with internet access, is unlimited really unlimited? I love Yahoo Mail, have used it since day 1 and really enjoy using it over Gmail. I look forward to the storage cap removal.

(now place your bets on how long until Gmail counters. I give it 2.5 days)

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