1. While I definitely agree about the “forced nature” of the upgrade, Ihardly notice anymore. That’s probably because I’m an IT guy, and I’ve worked with a wide variety of different email systems. I also don’t use the “flag email” function, so that doesn’t bother me. I was pretty angry about it at first, though.

2. I don’t like the new Yahoo mail either. I do prefer Gmail, as it keeps things more naturally organized (I am not one to manually move messages into folders and such.)

3. I too preferred the old Yahoo email. If it works, please don’t improve it.

   Had to shift to Windows 7 when my XP computer died, and it’s another damn improvement. Windows Explorer has gone from a straight-forward, visually and manually simple operation that has served since Windows 95, and was classic graphic logic then, to something almost unworkable. The decay began when Microsoft quit producing (what were brilliantly written) printed technical manuals, and changed the name from “directory” to “folder” to keep the bimbos feeling at home.

   They now must have electrical engineers or IT experts do their “manuals” and “Help” sections, because the writing assumes one already knows the answer, as they do. Or, it is what one old man I knew some 50 years ago called “marriage-manual” writing when I complained about an unreadable technical report: “they always say rub, but never when or where.” (And now I just made the error of assuming any of your readers will have any idea of the proprieties of those times.)

4. As a senior applications development engineer with 30 years experience i can tell you that MARKETING morons win out over engineers.

   in fact everyone does.

   and so, they do NOT listen when someone tries to tell them that what they want wont work…

   telling them its not human nature dont work, they are left liberal and often airheads, sooo people dont have natures..

   they ALWAYS make us make helpers.. ie, what your particularly complaining about… that they try to ASSUME what you want and whats best and so force you to comply with their improvment

   remember when a search engine could actually find a document you wanted?

   there WAS A time when you could type in exact lines from a document, and that document appears.

   try it today… they are so busy trying to help you buy stuff, skew what you see, favor companies, marketing, and data collection…

   here is a PERFECT example up close and intimate for people here

   the spaminator blocks the world po k er, and so ci al ist… why? who cares if you cant converse, we blocked the guys selling po k er games, and ci al is…

   same with their filters and a company wondering why no summa c u m laudes applied any more… given the dual meaning of C U M… well… it must be a dirty word and nothing else..

   and even worse.. i work with phds who cant read or comprehend with boses that side with that..

   i am doing a application for epidemiology study of pregnancy. the first trimester and second trimester had already collected data, and i am adding the third to this awful implementation.

   so lets see if the people here are smarter than phds

   note that its a study… and collected data, so to change questions, can change the study results…

   ok… so here is the “problem” copied from them and the bosses spreadsheet.

   (is this a planned pregnancy)–if you click “no” it goes to some a sub-question about how long you were trying to get pregnant.  This does not seem right.

   ok.. fine…
   but turns out that no matter how many times i tell them that it IS right and go back and read it… well, you cant do that. that would make me superior and they lesser… so we cant question their “feeling”..

   so now i am in trouble… and had to concede to ‘fix’ it…

   here is the question..

   Was this pregnancy planned?

   if you say YES… nothing happens and you go to the next question.

   if you check no, the following extra questions appear for the subject to answer

   Did you become pregnant even though you or your partner was using contraceptives at the time?

   What type(s) of contraception were you using at the time you became pregnant with this pregnancy?

   so whats the fix?
   they want me to REVERSE The first question..

   so now they want it these questions to apply to the YES not the NO…

   i keep pointing out that to reverse the questions will make all the prior answers and new ones in opposition for the same answer..

   and that the questions make no sense if the first question is about palnned and you ask them if they were using birth control while trying to get pregnant.

   but you see.. this is a pc feminist shop and a very pc department.

   so doing my job is to just make it break and be wrong… NOT be difficult and point out that the error is going to destroy the study.. and that any other competitor researcher will tear the new VP apart..

   so, i am going to change this.

   why?

   because the idiots are the ones with the social collusion to order it so or take my job away.

   i got in trouble for saying to my deparment that marketing was going to take the whole project. how do i know? 30 years at the same job for fortune 10, wallstreet and such… and thats what they always do…

   so… they didnt prevent it, marketing made the team they were working with look very bad as they have the ear.. made themselves look very good… and now we are in the funk

   so i understand very much in this new happy happy feminist way of doing business that employees are unthinking nobodies… they follow orders, not think… to think is to oppose the woman. to think is to not be easy and happy witohut conflict.. to suggest they are wrong is going to hurt their feelings and ‘downgrade’ the others in the department who didnt see it.

   SOOOO this is very common in all this… its the new womens way of doing things from a marketing feelings perspective…

   where the business moves the flags the same way a woman gets her husband to move all the furniture… to find out its better where it was 🙂

   where constant and confusing change is fresh.. and conserving what works, is boring, and not new…

   change for changes sake…

   of course since they are on the left… its all good as it has o consistency…

   DILBERT author has made a huge multimillion dollar career making fun of that…

   but its the same dysfunctional fun that the soviets had…

   so now us engineers. we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us… just like the workers paradise..

   one of my favs is when dilbert asks why does the world look like its run by idiotic drunken lemurs…

   the genius garbagman explains thats because the people who run the world have time to make up things to do…

   so dilbert asks why dont the smart people have time to do that.

   the garbage man says, its because they are too busy working to fix the problems caused by the drunken lemurs with time on their hands.

   Classic Example: HP.

   HP when run by Hewlett Packard was one of the most innovative computer technology companies… and dominated their markets.

   but that was before feminism…

   post feminism… they had to hire more women, had to change the culture, got marketing to be over tech (so they could ask for t hings that cant be done and say the engineers were just being mean – yes, they actuyally do that. )

   by that time, Carly Fiorina took over and turned one of the best technology companies. americas Sony… into a printer ink cartrige company..

   after she destroyed that… she went to the world bank… fun fun.

   but now, compare hp legacy to what they are now.

   classic left type image marketing surface taking over the substance underneath.

   how else could netflix move from top to bottom with one price change…
   want to guess if it was marketing who said it would be ok to do that? (the ceo takes the blame for the choice though)

   hey… when i saved Avon 20 million dollars, they had an award ceremony… gave me a certificate… gave a speech how this will make a big difference, etc… and gave me 100

   on the side they asked me what could they do to get peopel do do more of what i did..

   i said. why not give them .01% of the savings realized (ie after you save, not on projection)

   .0005% for the person who did the extra work, and a few thousand in bonuses and raises for management wont get people motivated.

   where i work they take our money and have these employee raffles icecream and such.

   they dont get (As they are elite) that the underclass would rather have a raise than a hot dog…

5. http://www.dilbert.com/

6. Drunken Lemurs

   http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Drunken%20Lemurs

   remember… decisions are made by people with time, not talent… talent is bad, it makes us unequal… it also doesnt exist, as it must be a product of the programming by others as you grow up.. which is why my trying to use my talent is very bad given i am a white oppressor and not a protected class.

   read dilbert… after a few hundred…
   you’ll get it

7. and this series search on marketing will explain a whole lot.

   http://search.dilbert.com/search?w=marketing&asug=mark&view=list&filter=type%3Acomic

8. I’ll second Artfldgr’s comment that marketing appears to drive many UI changes. I have a yahoo account that I use for chat but rarely for email. From Neo’s description (and the few time’s I’ve checked my yahoo email from the web and not my ‘droid) it sounds like they wanted to ape the Gmail UI. The star on the right sounds suspicially familar from Gmail. Ditto the UI changes in Windows 7 (which I so far have avoided .. MS will need to pry XP Pro SP3 off my cold dead hard drive) which seemed to be more a response the increasing popularity of the iDevice UI rather than an actual improvement.

9. I’d even place a number of the changes Ozy complained about to the iDevice influence as well. We got Office 2010 to replace Office XP, and I immediately recognized the button/ribbon UI as a rip off from Apple. And a particularly unwelcome one.

10. I only use webmail when there’s no other choice, which is when I’m not at home or work and don’t have my laptop. Being an old-school computer guy, I’m still married to quaint idea of an e-mail client. The client in question I’ve been using for many years is Mozilla Thunderbird. It’s simple, straightforward and can be readily customized with the plethora of extensions available (only a few of which I use).

    The advantage of using e-mail client software is that you are less likely to find things completely changed around, and even if you do, most native software is still far more flexible than a web application.

    I can’t imagine abandoning e-mail client software although my e-mail provider does provide a web client.

11. hey neo – you can use a client like conceptjunkie uses. get thunderbird (great btw), download yahoopops and you’ll get your yahoo email via thunderbird. this allows you to avoid the new email look, which i also hate.

    cheers

12. +1 for using a client you control. For the big three free webmailers, I find Hotmail the least annoying. But they still make it incrementally worse every so often. And for all I know you can’t get a new hotmail, and are forced onto the full bells-and-whistles MSN interface.

    If I could find a teletype-style interface, I would be happiest. I already have HTML disabled in Thunderbird. But forwards and replies are still cluttered with worthless characters and blocked art.

    I guess for the common person, time is *not* money.

13. Personal pet peeve: reload from inbox takes one back to “welcome to your new inbox” intro screen, not to the inbox. The Baby Jesus, she cries.

14. Thanks for pointing out the star feature to me. It is kinda helpful since emails get buried so fast. I use Gmail, Yahoo, and the execrable Lotus Notes. You get used to them.

    My wife hated Yahoo Mail so much that I installed the Windows 7 equivalent of her beloved Outlook Express for her. She is mostly happy with that compromise. You have to pay a little for that privilege.

    What is interesting is the way Facebook has replaced email for personal communication. I stay in touch with family members across the globe using FB. My running group lives on FB; our original web-site and forum have fallen by the wayside.

15. I have Yahoo email. I also use a very old computer. After being switched to the new version – which I didn’t like either – I was “noticed” each time I opened it that my resolutions setting were too low. I’m not sure exactly what the right resolution is, but I just checked and mine is at 832 x 624. After several notifications of “your screen resolution is too low”, it said basically “you have a deficient computer screen and we’ll have to switch back to the old yahoo email”. Heh. They didn’t hear me respond with a “See if I care!”.

    The funny thing is that I use the email box at work as well – the computer there is much newer/better/faster than my home one. I haven’t checked the resolution there, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference – it still shows up as the old yahoo email…

16. Artfldgr: Your laying the blame to Marketing, etc., rather than to the engineers and IT, sounds more real-world than my complaint.

17. Dear NN:

    You can get the same effect as flagging with Gmail.

    You can “STAR” items but there is a better way. Just create a label (FLAG, perhaps) and then apply the label FLAG to important emails. Then just click on the FLAG label on the left side of the screen and only the FLAGged ones come upand won’t be mixed in with their less-important brethren.

18. Back button takes you back to log in page.

    Cannot right-click on a message to open in another window.

    Most frustrating, links sent out will take you to different directory (Example: If I send a link to someone like http://www.cnn.com, when the link is clicked on it will take you to an entirely different page. Yes, I double check to make sure the links are right.)

    Also, lot’s of SPAM.

    Main login page takes to long to load large image. When I type in my user name and password, the page automatically refreshes while I’m typing my password which then is shown on the user name bar.

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