Yahoo Mail Search Broken
August 26, 2009
I have a for fee Yahoo email account. I tested the search system this morning. The queries returned a null set. The result message I received appears below:
I was unable to locate a way to query Yahoo about this problem. As a paying customer, I expect a system to work and to have an Apple style “report a problem” button available to me. At this point, I don’t know if the search issue is one specific to me or if it is an indication that a larger, more severe problem exists within the Yahoo mail search function.
Stephen Arnold, August 26, 2009
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38 Responses to “Yahoo Mail Search Broken”
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The search function has not been working for me for 3 days. I’ve spent 2 hours chatting with the customer support and technical department. Still no results.
I, too, am a premium paying mail customer and am very aggravated by the same problem. I much prefer Mail Classic and the mail search worked fine until a few days ago. Yahoo should be treating their mail customers better.
I’ve been having this problem for about 2 weeks now and possibly longer (away from my email for a while). I tried it again today searching for something I knew I had in my emails for sure and I get the same problem. I’ve been trying to research this and it appears some people had this problem last year.
August 31 update from zdnet.com – Larry Digman in “An odd Yahoo Mail search bug that requires escalation pronto” http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=23398
Appears that Yahoo migrated a nuymber of mailboxes to another server and has rebuilt a number of inboxes but it is not clear if all inboxes were rebuilt in the fix of the search function:
“What’s unclear is how prevalent the curious Yahoo Mail bug is. Should you have the similar issue with Yahoo Mail drop me an email and I’ll try and hook you up with the extremely helpful customer care department. Hopefully, Yahoo will kill the bum server and you’ll get your search back.”
Email him from the above link.
Hi guys, it is September 2nd and just when I have an urgent need to troll my Sent items in Yahoo, I realize the search function is on the blink!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Just when you need it, the d… thing dosen’t work… Jeez!
I haven’t been able to use search on my mail in months. And furthermore, hitting send Feedback brings up nothing! This is my primary mail account. I don’t want to have to go to the trouble of migrating to Gmail. How in heck does someone bring this to Yahoo’s attention to get it fixed, or do they even care??
Carolyn
All of a sudden, my Yahoo Seaach broke also. I depend on it.
Mine is broken as well. Trying to find an old email to forward but the search function is broken… What a pain.
I, too, have noticed that the search function is not returning anything except for “no emails match your search criteria”. I am also a paying Mail Plus customer. This started for me on the YahooMail Beta platform. I have not tried going back to the Classic mail. I submitted a Feedback ticket to Yahoo and am waiting for a response. If anyone has any success either with Customer Service or with the Search function, please let me know. Thanks!
Same with me. It was down last year for a while, work after that and hasn’t worked for the last few months. Talking to customer service hasn’t really helped. All they do is ask for your password, login to your account and then do nothing. I am not comfortable with that and I will probably have to move to Gmail at some point.
I’m having the same exact problem on Yahoo Mail Classic. I’m not a paying customer so I can’t complain much but it’s definitely frustrating and doesn’t help Yahoo’s case at a time when everyone seems to be switching to GMail…
i had this problem too and contacted yahoo. the issue was resolved. it took a while
My email search with Yahoo also has not been working for at least a month.
I have no idea how to go about fixing it.
the same issue,i dont why yahoo is silent even seeing all these quiries
Hey!! I have 2 Yahoo accounts and search works perfect on one of the accounts whereas there is ‘no search results found’ for the second one.
I rely heavily on searches and I believe everyone will be in the near future.
Why isn’t Yahoo doing anything about this problem?
Same issue as the others here. It’s Nov 2nd 2009, and still no fix from Yahoo. I e-mailed them yesterday. Searching inside yahoo mail yields ‘no search results found’ even when searching for subjects that appear in the Inbox. Frustrating, but I hope they respond to my inquiry yesterday. I’m also a paying premium customer.
well, it looks like google is winning the race, as if that wasn’t obvious, I liked yahoo’s user interface more, but with problems like these, I am about to be a google/linux man.
By the way, why haven’t the people risen up and thrown off the parasite that is microsoft? I mean, doesn’t anybody else realize that it is simply a parasite that has made it’s host dependant on it?
Perhaps the reason our economy crashed is cause of crap like this, nobody makes a good product any more. (sorry to get off topic)
My Yahoo! mail search was working just fine – up through this past Friday evening. Saturday morning, it was broken. I’ve sent two inquiries over the past three days and Yahoo hasn’t even had the courtesy to send me a response. That is totally unacceptable!
Further, I searched through every page of Yahoo’s help sections searching for a phone number to call. Clearly customer service is NOT important to Yahoo.
I need to be able to search my emails NOW because I’m in the midst of litigation and have to be able to locate the relevant emails to produce in court within 3 more weeks so right now I’m trying to figure out if there is anyway to migrate all my old email to another provide so that it will be searchable. This is ridiculous.
It just get fixed now. I hate it, hate it, hate it. Could someone tell the media about this? CNN or CNBC please.
Same issue. All I get from them is:
dmitry: This is a known problem: http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2009/08/26/yahoo-mail-search-broken/
Summer: Our engineering staff is currently looking into the issue that you’re experiencing. We apologize for the inconvenience and would like to assure you that we’re doing everything in our power to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
dmitry: Is there a workaround? Can you simply migrate all my email to another account (even a temporary free one) so that I can search. My business depends on being able to find stuff in the email.
Summer: I will take note of this and give high priority to your issue by following this up to the Engineering Team for faster resolution. I appreciate your patience regarding this matter.
I’ve had this problem on and off for about 2 years now. Plays out the same way every time. Customer service acts like it has never happened before, but yet they have a script for it! They want you to log out, they run a thing called the “vespa sync” on your account, and you have to wait half an hour or more before it will be ready to go, but of course they aren’t going to stay on the chat line for 30 minutes so you can take them to task when after waiting it still doesn’t work. Nope, you have to go through the whole CS process AGAIN, demonstrate the problem all over, and only then they will escalate it to engineering. Engineering will either quietly fix it, or email you a bunch of questions to which they could find the answers if they simply read the case notes. In the end, a few days later, it will mysteriously start working again, but you’ll probably have to figure that out on your own. CS will not provide contact information for anyone that you might want to send a letter to about the shoddy engineering of their system because “that would be a security risk, I hope you understand!” Strangely enough, Google seems to support search on its free email accounts (I pay Yahoo, but only because i want POP access) without having some customer service rep repeatedly fiddling with the controls to keep it working. Apparently the only decent engineers on the staff left a long time ago.
,..] arnoldit.com is other nice source of information on this subject,..]
Hi. We have had this problem for over half a year on all our family accounts. There is nobody to address this to. Now I am so happy that we switched to gmail.
It is Jan 20, 2010 and I have been having the same problem. Even if I search for my own name it says “No emails were found matching your search criteria”. I have been thinking of switching to gmail and this might push me over the edge.
Same here – it’s been fixed but then it breaks down one to two days later. Very difficult because my business depends on yahoo email search so I can find information in prior emails.
I’m having the same issue. They just give me ticket number 3328450 and no ETA. Has anyone else gotten any information?
Yes, I received the 3328450 ticket number also. No ETA. This is a different response than in the past – in the past the CS rep would ask me to sit tight while he worked on it, and within a few minutes it’d be working.
This time, it seems to be a system-wide problem.
I would be happy to pay Yahoo if they could just guarantee that the email search would stop breaking. My business depends on it. They will be driving me away soon.
I DO pay yahoo…. and I still can’t search.
got the same issue……cannot search…had my Yahoo mail acct for at least 10yrs. I am ready to bolt and have already setup a live.com acct. Can’t deal with gMail as once you log in it stores all seaches in google…not my pref…basically opposed to that intrusion. Am using trueswitch to get most of my emails off yahoo.
best of luck…
The problem may be fixed if You delete old content of Inbox or Sentbox(keep max. 6-700 items in inbox+Sent).I’ve tried this and it works.Good luck!I’ll hope You solve problem!(Please excuse my English,I-m not a native speaker)
šperky swarovski…
Tohle musíš vid?t…
justinaand550@hotmail.com
I am having this issue again! this happened to me two years ago and now it is reoccurring. Its ridiculous. I have contacted them three times in the last month and still not fixed. the idiots in the customer service area keep doing an account refresh, and they have no fkcing clue. It an indexing issue and the engineer team has to take it on. The issue number for me is 4176518, I am not sure if its a common id for this issue.
Nirav Assar,
I don’t have any suggestions. Yahoo seems to be paddling against the rapids. Thank you for commenting.
Stephen E Arnold, January 2, 2011
I finally threw in the towel. I had no choice. The email search on Yahoo has not been working for several months and after repeated attempts to contact Yahoo Customer Service, only to get a standard answer “our engineers are working on it”. I have finally exported my entire Yahoo email to Gmail. What else could I do? It was actually very easy.. Now I can search successfully to my hearts content. For me I found the situation crippling. What was the point of having unlimited Yahoo storage if it is impossible to search for older messages? Gmail is very reliable and no ads!
Sent to me by NO tracks or trailers.
I can’t believe our not-so-perfect email send-off getting my mailbox so no telling if the dvd put on my homey address was even picked up by snail mail. So many glitches and glabs.with my returning the discs .
Thank you for considering my next AVAILABLE MOVIE CAN BE SENT so I can watch it and return through the closest branch.