Yahoo Mail failure

My Yahoo Mail inbox suddenly became empty a couple of weeks ago. I lost between one and two hundred unfiled emails in my inbox. I had read everything (I think) but had appointments with people I hadn't met that I didn't have contact info for other than in the email exchanges.

When I realized my inbox was gone, I went into Yahoo help. There was a message re-assuring me their engineers were working on the problem. Whew! But I dug deeper and found an email restore option to go back up to 24 hours. I did this. Then waited. Either my restore request would come through or their engineers would make the world normal again.

Anyway, after numerous Live Chats and emails with their CSR's, Techs and engineers, I'm out an Inbox with no chance of ever getting it back. Once I accept this horrible reality, I start to ask questions to determine if I need to move to gmail to be assured of this problem never negatively affecting me again.

I ask: "Was this widespread? What caused it? What are you doing to ensure it doesn't happen again?"

The only partial answer was, "No, it was not widespread."

I then followed up with, "What do you consider 'widespread'? Only me? A few hundred? Thousands or more?"

No answer.

Then the Live Chat stops. I keep my window open and still nothing. After a few minutes I type, "Are you still there?"

No response.

Several more minutes pass and I type, "Hello?"

Still nothing.


The I get a follow up email. We go through the situation from the beginning and fairly quickly determine there is no hope of me getting my messages back so I start asking questions again. I re-iterated my three questions and received a diversionary question in response. I answer and ask the three questions again with a note indicating that I would tell everyone I know if they are unwilling or unable to address my questions.

I never received a response.

Since that time, I subsequently lost all of my Yahoo email contacts BUT was able to retrieve some.  Not sure how that happened either.

My advice: If you want reliable email, DO NOT USE YAHOO! MAIL.