Improving Yahoo Mail POP and SMTP Access
September 18th, 2008
(31 votes, average: 3.74 out of 5)
Loading ...A while back I mentioned that we had an issue that affected some of you retrieving your mail using a POP mail client like Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, etc. Even though we fixed that issue some time ago, it prompted us to take a look to see if there was any room to improve the POP/SMTP performance as a whole. As I’m sure you are aware by now, our team is committed to improving the performance of Yahoo Mail.
I can tell you, that after doing a thorough check of our POP server’s performance here in Europe, we came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t hurt to do a bit of an upgrade. And, if you’re a regular reader to the blog, you’ll remember we did a similar upgrade to our Webmail servers, which has dramatically improved performance across Yahoo Mail in the UK.
So, taking a page out of our own book, over the last month or so, we’ve been adding more hardware to improve the performance to our UK users that use an external mail client to access their mail. I can tell you now, that we’ve just completed installing brand-new hardware to process the mail that you send and receive. That means improved speed, fewer errors and an improved experience.
Take a look at the graph below starting at week 33 when the new hardware was installed. 100 is where we want to be (we’re not perfect yet as you can see at the end of week 35, but we’re getting there ;-)).
Happy emailing!
Andrew - Yahoo! Mail Team
Entry Filed under: performance
21 Comments Add your own
1. who knows | September 29th, 2008 at 5:54 am
but even your contribution, my email client says, ” POP Protocol Error: -ERR problem retrieving message. ”
if you can sort it out, please let me know how.
2. mark palmos | September 29th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Hi Andrew
Thanks for that, I had noticed an improvement.
There are a couple of things which I think YahooMail could benefit enormously from and one wishlist item:
1/ ability for Yahoo Mail to download only mail it has not downloaded already (if you are collecting from a POP server). At present one has to either choose to remove messages from the server once you have received your mail or to keep on getting ALL your messages, which results in duplicates with every receive.
2/ IMAP would be great, would sort that out substantially.
Wish Item - Yahoo Calendar/Notes Sync dynamically with mobile phones
Thanks
Mark.
3. Andrei | September 29th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Hi -
I was wondering whether Yahoo would follow suit and allow users to send email using its SMTP servers even if they would like to use a different email address. Google already provides a service like this.
This would allow small-business owners whose email uses their ISPs SMTP to send emails from abroad or while travelling.
Andrei
4. N | September 30th, 2008 at 9:33 am
we can’t access our mail!! all your ‘help’ people say is yu are aware of a bug and it will be sorted as soon as possible….err 3 weeks gone now!
5. Alan Findlay | October 1st, 2008 at 7:20 am
Are there any reported problems with Yahoo mail today - 1st October? Can’t log in at all for some reason.
6. Juliet Jacobsen | October 5th, 2008 at 12:01 am
Hi uh how do you use this thing?
7. Niel | October 8th, 2008 at 9:27 am
I use Thunderbird to retrieve and send my mail via Yahoo, and I think that the service is very very good. I wish I could say the same for gmail and hotmail(which I can’t even use because you need the payed version) Any more improvement would be great, but You guys are doing a fantastic job already. Keep up the great work!!
8. john.jones.name | October 10th, 2008 at 12:00 am
first of all how do I know I am using the UK servers ?
(i think I might be using the USA servers)
why do the yahoo smtp servers gateway in the USA ? it looks that way even when I do a nslookup here in the UK
please explain to the users we love this service and I am not the only one with this question see above
regards
John Jones
http://www.johnjones.me.uk
—-
Hi John,
Thanks for your comment. I am not a network engineer, so I’m not 100% certain I can answer your question. But I know that we do have SMTP servers in the US and in Europe. I guess I would have to know how you have set up your external mail client to answer specifically. It looks like you are a Mail Plus user, so you have the opportunity to use different servers than the free mail users (they are dedicated to Mail Plus users). Otherwise, if your mail client is set to get mail from pop.mail.yahoo.co.uk, you should be retrieving it from a server located in Europe.
Thanks,
Andrew
9. Guy Evans | October 11th, 2008 at 8:48 am
IMAP would be great since all my mail is organized in folders!
10. Sushil | October 11th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
i can’t download my mails to my outlook. i’ve tried several options. please tell me how to fix the problem. thanks
i use microsoft outlook 2003.
11. mags | October 15th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
I for one dont know what you have done but its no better in fact its worse and I cant even open any of my emails, thats after I have spent half an hour actually waiting to get to the mails. Please get it sorted as I can see lots of mail waiting for me to read but I cant open them. Before this I could access them but they were blank unless I went back and forward to them then I could actually read them . This is a nightmare and if it goes on much longer I am using another email service
12. istabraq | October 15th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
that’s very nice…
13. Teresa Small | October 16th, 2008 at 11:10 am
16/10/2008
SO VERY FED UP WITH YAHOO MAIL!!!! Nothing but problems. Supposed to of improved the service!! I have had problems all of the time for three weeks now. Today I just can’t get on to retrieve my MAIL. Come on, better service please
Teresa
14. bob | October 16th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
3 days now unable yo access my emails
15. Alex | October 18th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
It’s now resolved again finally after four days - phew!
16. Alex | October 19th, 2008 at 11:25 am
Spoke too soon … it’s gone again. Can anyone pleeeeeease explain?
17. digiwebbs | October 19th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
I’ve been having a few issues with yahoo mail this week - at times its really slow, and keep getting timeouts on windows mail (windows vista x64)
18. LesleyBe | October 20th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Hi reading your comments on mail service as for some reason since Oct 16th I have been unable to access my email? Just get loads of java errors and a blank i.e. white screen and a constant “transferring data from mail.yimg.com….”
So what can I do to fix it?
I use firefox - tried IE too but its failing on this - assume its somthing to do with the java element here’s its message?
Warning: Unknown property ‘diplay’. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://l.yimg.com/a/lib/my/css/core_0.1.220.css
Line: 1
19. Mark Cathcart | October 24th, 2008 at 4:40 am
I’ve certainly seem a performance improvement recently, however I’ve also recently seen a few times a large number of previously read emails downloaded via the pop mail servers. This has happened to two completely different clients, on completely different OS platforms, leading to the conclusion that its a server problem. Any reports of anything like this??
I use Thunderbird on WinXP and Outlook on Windows Mobile.
—-
Hi Mark,
Thanks for your comment, and glad to hear you’re noticing the performance improvements. I have yet to hear about the other issue that you mention in your comment (either from comments here or from customer care). I’ll keep an eye out for other reports of this issue.
Thanks,
Andrew - Yahoo! Mail Team
20. Paul | October 27th, 2008 at 12:29 am
still bad, a bit better than last week, but still fails more than half the time
21. onwubolu ikechukwu | October 30th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
After all the effort i still cant download my mails error message keep poping up to put my password but no progrees.
Anyway thanks for your effort.
ike
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