For a number of years Mrs World Wide Webber has been using Yahoo! for email. It wasn't an educated choice, she just needed an email address when she left university and Yahoo (and others) provided those for free.
Over time though Yahoo! has become a pain! in! the! arse! The user interface is lousy and the calendaring is laughable. Her calendars were recently moved to Google, and the only thing that staved off the death knell for Yahoo! email was that it's easily accessible from my wife's iPhone.
But finally last week things came to a head. My wife wanted two pretty reasonable things: to be able to read her email in Mail on her Mac and to use a non- @yahoo.com address for professional correspondence.
And here's where the pain begins. Yahoo! don't offer IMAP, in fact they don't offer anything other than POP which isn't going to help since my wife wants to access her mail both from a computer and from her iPhone, leaving the email stored on the server. Worse still the POP service costs money - $20 per year to be upgraded to the Yahoo! Mail! Plus! service. My wife's data had been kidnapped, and the kidnappers wanted a $20 ransom to release it!
What! a! rip! off!
But you know what? I paid it[*]. I paid it and I used the POP access to slowly but surely download each and every email my wife had stored with Yahoo! and upload them to gmail which happens to support IMAP for free.
My wife now has a real email address which she owns, that Google supports (for now) and which she can migrate as she sees fit. It works with her iPhone and she can check it on the Web when she needs to.
Good bye and good riddance Yahoo! The $20 sting in the tail to escape your clutches was extremely rude (can’t you make money any other way than taxing dissatisfied customers?), but in a year's time I will have forgotten about it, and you.
* YPOPS crashed on startup every time I tried, so no go there.