HT201419: Get help with Mail on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch
Learn about Get help with Mail on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch
Q: For twenty years I never once had a single problem sending an email.
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Aug 10, 2015 1:01 PMby John C. Wilson,The email carrier is yahoo. I have no idea what an smtp port is. It has never been necessary to have this information before. The one thing I have learned how to do on an ipad to unglue the chronically sticky innards is to hold down both buttons for a minute or so. I would presume this keeps me close to factory settings.
I am wondering if it is the case that Apple and Google simply do not want me using yahoo. I've had the address a long time and I'd like to keep it. If Apple has simply made a corporate decision to no longer support the old platform perhaps someone might have the grace to state that explicitly.
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Aug 10, 2015 1:26 PMby John C. Wilson,Csound1
I'm sorry I'm not good enough to play in your sandbox. I have been a yahoo user a very long time and simply did not have problems until buying an ipad. At present to get basic email service I have to borrow someone else's computer. I'm sure you can imagine that I am not the best person to be mucking around with someone else's computer.
I responded to rudegar because he at least took the query seriously and asked substantive questions. If you want to score points I am an excellent target to score from. I only want email service. I could care less if I meet your standards for online decorum.
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Aug 10, 2015 1:37 PMby KiltedTim,HelpfulIt has nothing to do with wild conspiracy theories about someone not wanting you to use Yahoo.
Yahoo's mail system is simply bad. It pretty much always has been.
If you were using a desktop computer, or a laptop that never left your local network at home, you probably never would have noticed an issue, but using a mobile device makes it much more likely that you'll be hitting a different mail server at any given time.
Whether you realize it or not Yahoo has hundreds of mail servers. Which one you hit at any given time is, to a degree, random. However, once you establish a path from a fixed point of origin (e.g. a desktop PC in your home on a broadband Internet connection), that path will get priority (I'm greatly simplifying this, but there is no need to get into the technical details, a basic understanding will suffice).
Yahoo's mail servers have a bad habit of getting 'out of sync' with each other, meaning it becomes much more likely that it will spin vomit and die when using a mobile device, and getting it working again is a crap shoot.
To make matters worse for those who aren't technically inclined, Yahoo's web mail does work when this happens, leaving people to believe the problem is with their device, when the problem is actually with Yahoo.
Dump Yahoo. Switch to something more stable. gmail, outlook.com, whatever... you'll be much happier in the long run.
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Aug 10, 2015 2:05 PMby John C. Wilson,Thank you so much for the thoughtful and informative reply. With that level of detail I will trust what you say. And you replied at a level that makes things clear to someone who is not technical.
Various official Apple help pages suggest switching to gmail with no explanation at all given. To me that looks like advertising and it looks like collusion. Given what you say I will take it that the free promotion is nothing more than shorthand.
I can also stop using the technician who tells me the problem is my device. Thanks again.
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Aug 10, 2015 2:52 PMby KiltedTim,HelpfulYou're welcome.
For what it's worth, this is not a new problem by any means. It's been ongoing since long before the iPad, or even the iPhone were introduced. The issue got more pronounced once mobile devices started to explode onto the market. Frankly, I find it amazing that Yahoo is still in business, especially with the scandals over the last couple of years with their ad server serving up compromised advertisements that distributed malware and ransomware.
Here's another example from less than a week ago. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/04/yahoo_malware_ads/
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Aug 10, 2015 3:43 PMby John C. Wilson,I am obviously not an expert but I can tell you why Yahoo is still in business. Many of us simply never have a good experience with computers. Microsoft gave us a stiff right jab and Linux gave us a right hook. Apple was a sucker punch. And so on. Yahoo is, or was, one of the few stable predictable things I ever saw on a computer. There's a lot of reluctance to change when the primary expectation is that the new service will be even more punishment than the old service. And fora like this one here are a lot like intruding on a clique of schoolyard bullies. Again thanks for being an exception to the rule.
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Aug 10, 2015 3:58 PMby Csound1,KiltedTim wrote:
You're welcome.
For what it's worth, this is not a new problem by any means. It's been ongoing since long before the iPad, or even the iPhone were introduced. The issue got more pronounced once mobile devices started to explode onto the market. Frankly, I find it amazing that Yahoo is still in business, especially with the scandals over the last couple of years with their ad server serving up compromised advertisements that distributed malware and ransomware.
Here's another example from less than a week ago. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/04/yahoo_malware_ads/
The main issue has arisen since Congress ordered Yahoo to do something about the appalling lack of security on their system, the changes made (and in some cases still being made) seem to be more than Yahoo can handle, and the merging of Yahoo and Yahoo + accounts has not helped.
In spite of that order Yahoo is still an unsafe and unreliable vendor, unlike Google who steal your data efficiently
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Aug 10, 2015 5:04 PMby KiltedTim,I Hate to say it, but outside of Apple, I prefer Microsoft these days when it comes to things like cloud services. They're the only major vendor who is HIPAA compliant, which says something. And their iOS apps are first rate. Well... OneNote is something of a pig, but that seems to be true on every platform.
