Yahoo! Mail Problems (and CRM Workflow) Worsen

Sometime over the past couple of years, I sought out Yahoo's customer service for premium mail users.  The problem at that time was an annoying false positive from the Norton AV scanner Yahoo was using.  It got me nowhere.  Because of that experience, I avoided contacting Yahoo service for ongoing problems with mail search.  But this week I decided I needed help, as I was unable to sort through the mail volume that had accumulated without using the search / filtering facility. 


This time, there seemed to be better, more courteous staffing in greater numbers.  As for effectiveness -- well, read on.


As the screenshot shows, the mail service would throw an error when asked to return more than headers for a sizeable search result (say, a few thousand emails). I'm now on the seventh contact with the Yahoo Mail help crew.  It seems that level 1 support has been given one tweak they are permitted to try before escalating.  For 2-3 of the calls, that's pretty much what was attempted, to no avail.  Once it was escalated to "Engineering," the problem seemed to get worse, not better.  After contacting Level 1 support again, as of this afternoon, I was told to try again in 24-48 hours (but only I had received a "We fixed it" message from Engineering). 


I'll be back on the chat line as suggested, but I thought I'd mention this error in case others have run into it.  There are some variations, but the symptom is either that the search fails, or that the result set will not fully load;  all the emails must be "retrieved" before one can, for example, move them to a folder. 


I'll update this post once it's resolved.


Error #5:
Method: SearchMessages
FAULT: SOAP-ENV:Server.MailboxOpenFailed.Busy
DESC: Error opening mailbox: mailbox busy
VER: 2.10.0 Build:374.4 04/28/2010 02:05 AM
HOST: cg1.c902.mail.ac4.yahoo.com
CBK: Converting circular structure to JSON
REQ: {

Update ~ noon eastern 30 May 2010:  Same CBK error, but now Error #20.  I.e., still not working. 


Update ~ 8 July 2010.  Still not working.  There have been more than 15 contacts with Customer Service and/or Engineering, including three purported Engineering escalations.

Unauthorized Changes to Windows 7 Automatic Update Settings

It's happened again.  Periodically, and it's not often, but often enough to be memorable, Windows Update decides to reset the settings from "Download updates but let me choose whether to install them" to "Install Updates Automatically (recommended)."  Yes, I understand the risks;  Microsoft may have detected a flaw that needs urgent patching.  My machine is vulnerable until I get around to launching the update. But what I'm consciously trading off is productivity.  What's lost is a complex desktop of settings --with Office applications, browser windows and specialized applications in particular states not easily reconstructed.  It takes 30-45 minutes to restore the desktop back to something resembling its previous state -- and sometimes that isn't feasible due to the dynamic nature of the applications and associated web content.


When researching this on previous occasions, I recall that Microsoft insisted that users must have been changing other settings.  This was certainly not the case here.  And there was no message from Windows Update to be responded to, and the machine was left in an idle state overnight.   No scripts were scheduled.  There should have been little unscheduled activity other than backup scripts running on servers, and those backup scripts do not touch local drives.


I acknowledge that Windows Update is a complex beast and that sorting out dependencies and update sequencing is anything but trivial.  Based on previous responses, I don't expect a solution, only denials.  But I thought I'd post this message so that you know you're not imagining that the settings "changed themselves" again.


24-MAR-2011 Happened again on today's updates to Windows 2008 Standard.