OK. I logged into my second Yahoo email account recently. I typically login to my catchall account everyday to look at the spam, check email marketing samples, and look for anything of value that may find it’s way into the account. But I login to my “technical” account about once or twice a month.
For the longest time, if you had multiple Yahoo email accounts, you had to log out of the one that you had opened on your machine because Yahoo only allowed access to one email account per machine.
So before I could open a browser window and log into my Yahoo email tech account, I had to log out of my Yahoo catchall account, even if I had the “stay logged in” box unchecked.
Well, I made a mistake two days ago. I was on my laptop logged into my Yahoo email catchall account in IE8 and I opened a second IE8 window and opened the Yahoo site. To my amazement, it didn’t come up with my catchall account logged in.
Out of curiosity, I signed in to my Yahoo email technical account and it allowed me to do that. Furthermore, I was still logged in on my Yahoo email catchall account in the first IE8 browser.
What happened?
I mean, for the longest time, when IE7 was in full bloom and IE8 was nothing more than a sparkle in an engineer’s mind, I could only login to one Yahoo account per machine. Which meant that while I could open up multiple browsers and login to multiple Google accounts simultaneously, Yahoo only allowed me to login to one account on one machine regardless of the number of IE7 sessions I opened.
Now, my Yahoo accounts were behaving almost like my Gmail accounts.
First, I thought it was the new IE8 browser configuration that accounted for the change.
But that didn’t wash. I had another machine still running IE7 and I saw the same behavior on both configurations with Yahoo email accounts.
Then I thought that maybe it was because I also had Firefox and Chrome loaded on my test rig.
But that didn’t make sense either because I had no other browsers on my machine that was running IE7. My Yahoo email accounts still behaved like my Gmail accounts on both machines.
Eventually, I determined that regardless if I was running IE7, IE8, Firefox, or Chrome in combination with Windows XP, Windows Vista Ultimate or Vista Business, Yahoo mail was now behaving more like Google Gmail.
After much brain wracking and gnashing of teeth, I came to the conclusion that it was nothing that I had done. It was something that the good people at Yahoo had done.
Was it a result of the new portal look?
Did it happen after they killed off their personal blog and briefcase services?
Or maybe the team up with Microsoft had something to do with it.
I’m still waiting to hear something from the Yahoo team.
For now, know that if you configure your IE8 browser using the “nomerge” flag, your machine will handle multiple Yahoo email accounts the same way that if handles multiple Gmail email accounts.
Labels: Email, Gmail, Internet Explorer, SalesITTechBlog