Yahoo’s Lack of Clue

Anyone who’s been on a Yahoo mailing list with an absentee list owner knows that they tend to be a spam magnet. I’ve ditched several that became spam lists because Yahoo refuses to appoint new list owners, block the spam, remove the spam or even cancel the spammers Yahoo accounts.

For a company that seems to welcome spammers with open arms, it was a bit of a surprise a couple of days ago to find my Yahoo account had been deactivated.

If I didn’t have a couple Yahoo Groups set up I would have killed the account and created a new one, but having seen Yahoo’s laxness in hosting Groups, getting my account reactivated seemed the best option. Once that was sorted I could create a backup Yahoo account (you have to be a Yahoo account holder to own a Group) on my Yahoo Groups in case they screwed up again.

Trying to contact Yahoo about anything is almost impossible. You have to just through the hoops of their useless help section before you can find a contact form, and even then it’s only after answering that no, this useless response didn’t help.

Firing off a request for help results in an automated reply full of the same garbage that I’d just told the service wasn’t helpful. Right at the bottom was a section telling me to reply to the e-mail if I needed more help.

Forget about prompt action. These guys aren’t getting back to you for at least two days. If you’re lucky. And don’t expect help then either.

Despite the names of the supposed Customer Care Specialist — Monique and Pablo — the e-mails were routed through an Indian outsource centre in Haryana and, judging from the canned responses, I have serious doubts if they even came in contact with a human at all.

There were several repeated e-mail asking for my details, before I was informed that: You have been deactivated due to abuse. What the fuck? A request for details was promptly sent off. I did point out that if my Yahoo address had been spoofed in spam that it’s pretty bloody easy to check whether the e-mail had actually come from me or a mail server in Kazakhstan. This time it resulted in a blank response.

Oddly enough, my account was magically working again this morning.
I still have no idea why my account was deactivated or what the supposed abuse was, but am far from impressed at lack of help offered by Yahoo. This is a company that needs to get a serious clue about customer service, how to recognise false-positives and how to handle genuine abuse of the system.

Taking a leaf from Lucie’s book, this is the pre-emptive anti-moronic comment note:

• I do not work for Yahoo
• I cannot turn your deactivated account back on
• I have no idea why mine was turned off, nor why it was turned back on
• The only way to get it turned back on is to contact Yahoo through their silly anti-help pages; most of which are inaccessible if you don’t have a working Yahoo account
• If you leave stupid comments that indicate you haven’t bloody well read this article before you dribbled on your keyboard, the resident webmonkeys will point, laugh and possibly throw shit at you