Yahoo, still an awful company

Today I had to speak to Yahoo Customer Support for my parents. They forgot their Yahoo mail password yet its saved on their iPad. Worst experience ever, with any customer support.

Firstly, I had to wait three hours to even speak to a rep. And the customer service line says 'your call may not be answered today.' Ridiculousness!

The rep wouldn't even give me her name or employee number to report her. She basically said if we don't know the answer to the secret questions, we can't get the account back. I told her that we would fax photo identification, social security card, etc if necessary to prove the ownership of the account. Additionally, I let her know that we still had access to the account via the iPad mail yet didn't know the password. She actually would not transfer me to a manager or even give a name. Her exact words were "I'm the only one here. Goodbye." and then hung up on me. For a company trying to beat Google, I cannot believe I had to put up with this shit. Seriously, Yahoo is an awful awful company.

I don't know what to do next. My parents run a business and the Yahoo email is necessary for their business. I cannot believe how unprofessional Yahoo is and furthermore uncaring.

Any ideas?

I'd approach this in the following way:

- Sign up for an account with a company that specializes in email. I use Fastmail myself, but there are (many!) others.

- Purchase a domain relevant to their business and set up an email on that. joe@momandpop.com, that sort of thing.

- Update whatever refers to the old address (websites, flyers, business cards etc.) so if this happens again, you can switch providers but keep the same email address.

- Get a decent password manager application, and teach your parents to use it. I just use Emacs + ccrypt to store my secrets; they'll probably need a simpler solution but there are many available.

- Continue working on Yahoo! to regain control of the Yahoo! email address, assuming that's still important (e.g. customers will try to contact them on it). Try calling back at different times, email / online chat (if available) or even send a solicitor's letter. Realistically, though, I think that email address is gone for good.

If there's one important lesson to learn from this, it's that important email addresses should be on a domain you control, not .yahoo.com, .google.com, etc. etc.