I wanted to sign up for Uli Kusterer's mac-gui-dev mailing list.

I have an old Yahoo!® account, but I plan to get rid of it because it's a giant spam bucket. So I make a new one. Here begins my tale of woe.

I pick my standard trashcan account for the "alternate address", and go immediately to the marketing page and turn OFF all the dozen+ junk mail lists Yahoo!® sign you up for when you create an account.

I join the group, that works fine. Now I try to add a new list-collecting address at one of my sites as another alternate address. And the form just silently fails. Nothing happens.

I submit a problem report, and frankly at this point I don't expect anything to happen, I expect they'll just ignore it and continue fucking up like the bunch of yahoos that they are at Yahoo!®.

So for now, I need to use Yahoo!®'s mail reader. When I get into the web-email client, I don't see my inbox. First, I get assaulted with a bunch of modal dialogs pointing out the features I didn't ask for, didn't want, and have fuck-all to do with my email. Underneath them is a page full of ads and news links and every damn thing except email. There's no way to turn this off and go straight to the inbox.

Then when I manage to fight my way to the inbox, I get assaulted by a giant red blinking "YOU ARE ALREADY A WINNER" circa-1996 banner ad. Who the fuck is stupid enough to click on one of those? Are they just trawling for lonely, confused old pensioners and stealing their money? Yahoo!® helps con artists steal money from your gramma. This is a fact.

Every single step of this process is filled with hate. I'm not going to be favorably inclined to anyone stupid enough to advertise there, I'm going to despise them and buy from their competitor. Almost every part of the site is hideous and bad.

I'm clearly spoiled by Google's nearly perfect Zen design. It's mellow, simple. Plain text, no garish colors, no blinking, no image ads. They focus on the content you want, with some other stuff off to the side you can look at if you want. Even the customized, art-themed iGoogle page is an order of magnitude simpler than the Yahoo home page, and it's entirely optional.

Yahoo!® is no damn good at anything. They betray their customers to the Chinese dictatorship to be imprisoned and tortured, they spam and infect PCs with viruses, and they can't even get something as simple as webmail right. Yahoo!®, please die.