Yahoo! Mail Bug? Emails disappearing upon reaching 65,535 emails in one of the folders

I am very confused.

I subscribe to several email lists including MySQL and Ruby on Rails lists. Generally, I keep my mailbox clean except for a folder in which I was archiving messages Ruby on Rails.

A few days ago I noticed that my Ruby on Rails folder reached 65535 messages. Today, I was looking to reply to an email from Keith Murphy (to which I had previously replied as well) and was surprised to find that the particular message didn't show up in my search. This particular message was sent on April 30 so I started scanning all my emails received on that day.

Surprisingly, I didn't find it even after a careful visual scan. Not only that, I noticed several of emails I received in the last 2 weeks missing. My initial reply to Keith was still sitting in my Sent mail folder. My trash folder also had several emails that I had deleted but not the ones that were missing.

For the life of me I cannot figure out where these emails went. Then suddenly I noticed that the Ruby on Rails folder still has 65535. Which is very weird as this is an active list.

I decided to send an email with criteria that would make it land in Ruby on Rails folder. After 6 hours, the email is still isn't in my inbox.

With 65,535 being a magical number representing a limitation of 65,536 objects, I believe this is a limit of a Yahoo! folder. Not only that, it seems that once you hit that limit, all sort of weird things start happening. Like, in my case, random missing emails.

This is pretty upsetting as I am not sure how many of my emails are missing. As soon as I deleted a few emails to bring the count down to 65,535, new emails from Ruby on Rails list started arriving (although not the one I had sent myself earlier today).

Now, unfortunately, I feel paranoid, not knowing how many important emails I have lost.

So, I have decided to open a new email account fmashraqi at yahoo and will be updating my contacts to start sending me email on that address.

My reason for posting it on this blog is to ask the community members if they have noticed anything like this? I know 65,535 emails is an insane number of emails but at one point I was interested in archiving the list. With Yahoo! offering unlimited storage, I wonder why isn't this limit documented?

Microsoft's $44.6 billion hostile bid for Yahoo!

Microsoft has finally decided to bite the bullet and made a hostile $44.6 billion bid to acquire dying Yahoo!

I personally think that Microsoft will eventually just kill Yahoo! Although who knows. I can't wait for Microsoft advertising to advertise to hire BSD and MySQL gurus to keep Yahoo! running. That'll be funny. For some reason, I can't see them switching Yahoo! to SQL Server.

MySpace for 25% Yahoo!

Note: The following views are just that: mine and not my employer's.

News Corp is considering swapping MySpace for 25% share in Yahoo.

Made me think: Is it "the" sign that Yahoo! has given up or is MySpace really worth that much?

Yahoo! holds some key IP assets and it can certainly make a come back, or so I believe. It is just a matter of leadership that can find the right balance between monetization and user experience.

Monetization today is all about contextual. Sure there are many companies today that are pitching behavioral targeting as bigger, but honestly speaking, we are not there yet. Behavioral targeting just cannot monetize as well, at least not now.

Contextual, on the other hand, is a gold mine with relevancy being the key. I cannot stress how important the relevancy is. It is relevancy that is not spam, satisfies a query and makes a user feel ads are not intrusive. Relevancy is so important that I believe it was the primary reason that DoubleClick didn't become Google. Lack of attention to relevancy is where MSN fails as well.

Sure, Google can and will continue to diversify into many areas, but I doubt they will find a cash cow that is not based on, or directed related to relevancy.

Valuing MySpace for 25% of Yahoo! is not a good deal from Yahoo's point of view, at least not from the financial perspective. Giving the changes that are in the air, I would value Yahoo! for what it will be worth five years from now. Making such a big decision today is going to cause a lot of regrets later.

I believe, that's a lot of Yahoo! for a lot of teenagers who may not get Yahoo! out of the situation it currently is in: lack of balance between monetization and relevancy. If you see things differently, I'd love to know.

Terry Semel (Yahoo! CEO) Quits

Weeks after Yahoo! CTO's resignation (or was he forced out :)), Yahoo! CEO quits. Unlike Google, Yahoo! turned to old media to lead the company. The results of course were way below par. Terry Semel was a controversial choice but one that at times, brought hope. At no time in Semel's tenure that hope seemed sustainable. Destruction of Overture, failed acquisitions like Web Jay and lack of effective strategy (yes Yahoo! Photos, yes Flickr!, no Yahoo! Photos).

Jerry Yang is himself stepping up to take charge. According to "The Google Story," this is exactly what was so hard to give up at Google where all kinds of pressure was applied to let go of the CEO position.

But does it really matter whether Jerry Yang holds the CEO title or not? Yahoo!'s focus on centralized decision making is famous enough to be part of Strategic Management courses. The question that comes to my mind is whether Terry was allowed to do what he wanted or his position was just used to get the signatures.

Is Jerry the right person who can lead Yahoo! to recovery? We'll see. But the change itself doesn't seem exciting or promising to me. As a Yahoo! user, I would have liked to see someone other than the "obvious choice".

On a side note, I am highly disappointed by the extreme focus on commercialization of Yahoo!'s home page. Too many ads and too many commercial links.