Online booking - problem and pitfall with Yahoo
 

(Also posted on Europe board, apology for duplication.)

As noted in yesterday's FFR&R thread, Yahoo is driving me buggy. For a full week I've been trying to get actual help from their Customer Care people because one of the folders in my mailbox won't open -- and it's the one in which I filed all email concerning travel, such as hotel confirmations and e-tickets.

Fortunately, I always print out these things before I file them. BUT aside from the inconvenience and the loss of records I'm concerned about some sort of security breach here. It's the ONLY folder (among about a dozen) with this problem. In general, I try to practice "safe internet," but for travel especially, you're pretty much forced to use the net for such transactions.

Would appreciate 1.)advice on how to get to an actual, responsive human being at Yahoo (all roads seem to lead to the same fill-in-the-blank Customer Care form, which ALWAYS results in an autoresponse, saying "if the problem persists, click here" -- and clicking there either results in nothing or another autoresponse); 2.) ideas about whether I have any reason to worry about security -- as best I can recall, not one of those emails had a complete credit card number (just XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-5555 or some such), but still.... ; and 3.) your own experience.

??

I've used a yahoo account for several years, and once in a while had a problem but nothing that lasted as long as this has for you.

Unfortunately, I don't think there is a way for the public to contact them "live and in person".

Have you tried filing out the form that comes up after you hit the "contact us" icon on this page?

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/mail-03.html

Repeatedly. And that's the form to which they repeatedly send an "autoresponse" in answer. Cannot break the cycle.

Update: got a response timestamped 2 am that pinpointed the problem in the spelling of the file/folder name. Since I had named it a long time ago and hadn't had a problem 'til recently, it never occurred to me that that was the problem. Renaming it took care of the problem And apparently Yahoo people work at odd hours.

Moral of the story: May be much better to download all travel receipts, confirmations, e-tickets into your own computer than to leave them in online mail boxen. Problem: sometimes formatting won't translate, but you can usually fiddle something.

I have Adobe PDF on my computer - I routinely convert emails to PDF to save them. It is realy easy and there isn't any issue with reformating.