Sometime in the last two days Yahoo Mail (which I use for my personal email account) broke for me. I can no longer reply to any email; clicking on the Reply button just doesn’t do anything. I searched the web, couldn’t find anything about it, so decided to email Yahoo support. Below is my email and their response.

The ‘Reply’ button is broken on my system (Firefox 1.0.4 on Linux). It was working till a few days ago, now clicking on the Reply button doesn’t go to the ‘Compose’ screen.

I suspect a Javascript error. The following appears in the Javascript console:

… technical stuff …

I’ve tried restarting Firefox and that doesn’t fix it.

Some choice snippets from their response:

Hello,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Mail.

We appreciate you bringing this to our attention. Your account appears to be in full working order. We have listed a few troubleshooting steps below which may help resolve this issue:…

• Add Yahoo! Mail to your list of “Trusted Sites” in Internet Explorer…
• Switch your browser to Mozilla or Netscape…
• Finally, shut down and restart your browser.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

Regards,

Danny

Thanks for not reading my email Danny! Had you bothered to read it, you’d have seen what you suggest either I’ve already tried or is inapplicable. In fact you would have seen that the problem is nothing to do with my account, and everything to do with crappy broken code in Yahoo Mail. It’s just too bad I can’t reply to your message to tell you this directly.

It’s amazing that bad customer service is worse than no customer service. Before I contacted Yahoo I merely slightly annoyed. I assumed they’d be aware of the problem (I can’t be the only person facing this) and would fix it reasonably soon. Now, as you’ve guessed, I’m rather more angry. There’s a lesson there.