Rogers decided to replace their entire email infrastructure by outsourcing to Yahoo. In essence, each Rogers customer gets a "premium" Yahoo account (which they have to sign up for explicitly). Problem is, so far the Yahoo servers have given anything but premium service (not to mention the need to agree to let Yahoo and Rogers share your data, including credit history data, with anyone they care to).

I've basically spent the whole day fixing some stupid error where the server was refusing to let Mozilla download some message, but wouldn't let it fail either (same bug managed to mess up the Yahoo webmail client from accessing the inbox a few times too). When they do work, they're ridiculously slow (though I suppose there's a certain fascination with seeing every little step the client is going through to resolve, connect, login and download, a process which was previously instantaneous).

Am I the only one who feels that email is too much a core service to be outsourcing (particularly to a group with as shaky an infrastructure as Yahoo)? As my email to Rogers mentioned, "Poor email support is a very black mark on any ISP's balance sheet."

I'm seriously considering moving my email and maybe even the web-site over to Vex, problem is that my old web-site is linked to from... well... lots of places... Egads! What if they outsourced the web server too and I have to use that stupid Yahoo interface again (I left Yahoo ages ago)? Maybe I can switch, after all, I'd build up page-rank again...