Yahoo mail slowness

Suddenly become slow on internet explorer

[brendanfernandes]

Hi All,

Has anybody experienced extreme slowness on Yahoo Mail in the last day or so?

Oddly, it happens only on Internet Explorer, and only on some machines. Clicking on any email folders or any emails, there is a 10 to 20 second delay before any page is loaded. It was fine yesterday!

On Opera - on the same machine - it's fine!

A friend of mine who uses Yahoo Mail on Internet Explorer says it's fine for him... and for a colleague of mine it's medium-slow. But for myself and one other person, it has suddenly become horrendously slow...

Neither of us have any odd settings, just the usual iexplore defaults. And it's only happened in the last day or so.

Are yahoo doing something with their email at the moment?

Any thoughts? Or is it just me who's had this problem? All advice greatly appreciated!

[bill]

brendanfernandes welcome to WebmasterWorld.

If there are noticeable differences for the mail service on the same PC then that narrows down the problem to IE I would say. I would suggest you purge your IE cache, delete your History and restart the software. If there are still speed issues there may be some other settings we could tweak.

[brendanfernandes]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for your reply! I have tried what you suggested but no joy... I feel that there may be something that yahoo may be doing. It's literally the case that I click on a folder, then nothing for 10-20 seconds except the "opening page..." progress bar, then the page loads. Basically all the symptoms point to the fact that the server is responding slowly.

I suspect that due to the suddenness of this problem, perhaps yahoo may have just started using a browser feature of internet explorer that works well for some users but not others.

Other sites load and work just fine.

I don't know a huge number of yahoo mail users, but I suspect that there may be a few of us who are noticing this!

A peek at "View Source" in both opera and iexplore for the same folder in Yahoo Mail points to differences in the javascript served to the two browsers. For example, the iexplore version contains lines looking like:

if (! window.showModalDialog ¦¦ window.external.IYBrowserExtend) {

Perhaps Yahoo are detecting the browser and doing something funny if they think the browser supports it?

[bill]

Do you see the same behaviour if you switch Opera to identify itself as IE? How about FireFox doing the same thing?

[simey]

I've noticed the same slowness. Only the last few days..

[brendanfernandes]

Good thinking Bill. I just checked though and my Opera is already set to identify itself as Internet Explorer.. perhaps yahoo are good at spotting fakes. The javascript served up to each browser are certainly different.

Runs like lightning on Firefox...

I've turned off all browser features except javascript on iexplore and it's still the same, slow. (Javascript is really necessary to run Yahoo Mail, though the non-javascript version runs quickly on iexplore).

If it's happening to others too, I am still suspecting a massive boo boo by yahoo!

[bigdaddy1]

I get the same slowness too, in the last couple of days.

[brendanfernandes]

I wonder what to do... I can't find a contact address for Yahoo. You'd think they'd be aware of the problem, but as it seems to affect only some people but not others, it may be an esoteric one.

Quite considerable slowness though, almost to the point of unusability.

A few more days of this and people will leave in their droves...

[txbakers]

same for me, but it seems to be working fine again.

[brendanfernandes]

Excellent, yes they've clearly sorted it out now.

Thanks for all your replies; I thought it was just a small number of us suffering mass delusions...

[bill]

Glad things are working again. Was there any notice posted about the trouble or did it just resolve itself?

[brendanfernandes]

No message, it just started working. The same sort of javascript is being served up, so I guess it may have been an internal problem which bizarrely only affected some browser combinations....

[anax]

I had this problem a couple weeks ago - Yahoo mail slowed to a crawl and became unusable. It cleared up in a day or two. I am pretty sure the cause was some kind of malformed spam (as opposed to well-formed spam?) that appeared in my inbox. I noticed that the underlying page code would erupt onto the screen when I tried to view the message, and I could never move or delete it. When the mail problem cleared up, that message was gone (and I hadn't deleted it).