Yahoo Mail acting up: Error Code 5
I’ve been a Yahoo! Mail customer for years… probably as long as they actually had an email product…. Heck a few years ago, I even decided it was time to upgrade to Yahoo! Mail Plus…. again in support of a great product. But recently, coincidentally around the same time that Microsoft announce they buy out bid for Yahoo, my mail has been acting like shit. If I’m lucky, I can actually access my email 1 a week without getting this stupid ‘Error Code 5’ crap. If I could actually access my email I’d post a copy of the responses I’ve received when I’ve contacted them.
This is actually the full message I see when I try to long into my mail:
You’ve stumbled upon a temporary problem we’re having with Yahoo! Mail. Usually this problem gets resolved quickly, without you doing a thing. In fact it may be taken care of now.
- Try pressing the Reload or Refresh button on your browser, or logging out then back into your Yahoo! account. Hopefully that will take care of things.
If that doesn’t fix the problem, please be patient while we sort it out and try again shortly. The fact that you’re reading this page means we’ve been automatically notified of the issue, and chances are we’re working on it now.
- If you think you’ve been more than patient and tried the tricks above, feel free to contact Customer Care about Error Code 5.
Thanks,
The Yahoo! Mail Team
Sorry for the inconvenience.
You know temporary issues only last for a short time, and they should be happening every day for weeks at a time. From what I remember of the responses I’ve received from my contacting customer support, basically they said that it is typically caused because of an external reader issue, and that basically I must be accessing the email from either 2 computers or the Web and a client at the same time… okay then what is the point of offering POP access for plus members??? I use the POP support to check my email from my PalmOS Treo. Anyways… just to humor them, I disabled mail from my phone about a week and a half ago (mind you, I’ve been using a mail client on my phone for over 6months…), and the problem still remains….. well Yahoo! get your act together or I’m out of here…. you are quickly loosing a customer that has supported you for years….
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Nick,
Did you ever manage to resolve this issue?
This has suddenly started happening to me.
Thanks!
after a handful of emails to support and eventually a phone call… turns out that what solved my problem was changing my password. Turns out the system doesn’t work well with POP services even if you have a Plus account. My client on my phone would attempt to check email updates while I was logged into the web-based system. When this would happen my guess is that the ‘security’ measures would assume that the account was being ‘hacked’ and would then kick out… so try changing your password and disable any extra POP access tools to see if it continues to happen…. if that doesn’t solve the problem…. you can do what I did… move to GMail (with forwarding access via my plus account)
Since I got here from a search, I’ll assume others might, too. Like Nick, I’m a longtime user and one-time fan of Yahoo. These days they just can’t find their ass with both hands. Yahoo mail has so many problems there’s no reason starting a list of them. And the more they mess with it, the worse it gets. There are thousands of complaints on the web, and Yahoo just doesn’t respond at all. I’ve been getting “error 5” and I have 1 browser, 1 email account, 1 user, no external mail software and years of practice and using the same password. It’s NOT OUR FAULT AT ALL – it’s the bunk software.
Surprisingly, I’ve never had an issues with the response time from Yahoo. My support request were usually answered within hours (and less if I used my gmail address). Now this all said, I’ve also not only been a fan, but I’ve been paying the ‘plus’ membership for easily 7+ years. Really the only reason I went to GMail was because I have an Android based phone. So I’m still a fan of Yahoo products and actually I prefer the Yahoo Mail interface to the GMail interface. I still use Flickr, and Delicious works great (I preferred Ma.gnolia). And Buzz… I like its simplicity, but I’ve stuck with Digg. So I am still a Yahoo Fan
The same thing has been happening to me for a week and a half now but I get Error codes, 5,14,and 15. they all say the same thing in terms of a solution,I will try changing my pass word to see if that fixes it! I use Firefox and I have web mail notifier installed that might be causing the issue.
Argh – having same problem myself & am on ‘online chat’ tech support right now. What is most annoying about this is that the tech support person clearly does not speak English as a native language, which is not really an issue for me except that I have to keep explaining colloqualisms like ‘all set’ to him(?)… Sigh… I just want to read my email.
I didn’t realize this “error five” problem has been happening off and on for awhile. I just started having the problem this past week in accessing my yahoo mail account. Have never had a problem before an have been using it for several years. For the past few years been doing the same thing; I work on genealogy on ancestry on one window; another is open to go to LDS; and the other so I can either check my email or look up something else; so I usually have three windows open online and my Reunion program. My husband over a month ago got a Apple 3G phone and recently sits nearby accessing his email and playing games more than he used to and I was begining to that maybe when he accesses his email account which isn’t thru yahoo that that could be causing the problem.
I was accesing the “newer” version of yahoo mail and “they suggested going back to the “classic”‘ but even that has changed in the last few weeks and still getting that dan “error 5 message and exact wording as what the first message says. Its is so frustrating that it is now doing it more than it was.
Trudy, I started having Error Code 5 issues that started in June, even though the frequency of POP access, and number of email clients hasn’t changed, and I ended up reducing them, just to see if it would help the problem (it hasn’t). However, I too recently got an iPhone 3GS (switched from a Treo 700p, which accessed my Yahoo Mail Plus via POP). The default way my iPhone imported my Yahoo Mail settings from my Mac Mail account, ended up setting up my iPhone Yahoo Mail account with Push (IMAP) settings, which didn’t work well with all my other email clients using POP access for Yahoo Mail Plus (on the iPhone with IMAP, it looked like I never had new messages because my mail clients on my computer downloaded them, so IMAP made them look like they had been read). I can’t help but wonder if the simultaneous POP and IMAP access to Yahoo Mail Plus caused the problem. I deleted the Push Yahoo (default) set-up on my iPhone, and now have Yahoo Mail on my iPhone set up with POP settings, just like my other clients (and old Treo).
Does your error code ever give you debug details (you see a little triangle you can click for this info)? If so, I would be interested to see them. My details are below, but the big thing in my mind is that there’s a date in my code that is really close to when I got my iPhone, and really close to when my problems started. Note that today I got an error code 20, but it also listed identical info on line 3.
BTW, Yahoo Customer Service has been frustrating, because they often ignore details in my emails. I’ve been going in circles with them, and they usually give me the same response, that error code 5 is due to too frequent of access to my mail accounts, even though I’ve recently set all my clients to access much less frequently than they have been for the past 5 years. I’ve also done testing that produced the error 5, even when all my mail clients were turned off. It’s like the will not consider there is any other cause for this error. I’ve been trying to get Yahoo to comment on the details of the below debug info, but so far they haven’t.
DETAILED DEBUG INFO
Error #5:
0: ListMessagesFromIds
1: SOAP-ENV:Server.MailboxOpenFailed.Busy
2: Error opening mailbox: mailbox busy
3: V2.1.0 B1357.22 06/18/2009 07:28 AM
4: cg1.c701.mail.mud.yahoo.com
Error code 5 is not an “issue” with the Yahoo software. It is caused by multiple simultaneous attempts to access the mailbox. This can be due to multiple browser windows accessing the mailbox at the same time, Email client and browser accessing or PDA/Phone accessing. Any combination of those accessing the mailbox at the same time will cause an error code 5.
Iphones and Blackberries are notorious for causing this. They often won’t release the POP connection from the server. Shut the phone off for a minute if this happens.
Changing your password and waiting a few minutes can help too.
Basically, your own usage and habits causes this error. Just adjust them a little and it clears right up.
Well, I’ve come to discover the actual reason my iPhone is causing my Error Code 5. I have six POP mail accounts, and every time I simply view any of the six inboxes on my iPhone, the iPhone mail client checks all six POP accounts for new mail. So I could easily access my Yahoo Mail Plus POP 6 times in a minute, just looking at my six inboxes. So even with my iPhone set to fetch mail only once an hour, and never intentionally checking for new mail, the mail app just keeps doing it’s unwanted mail accessing. Why the iPhone mail client is set-up to fetch mail for all mailboxes when simply viewing an inbox is beyond me. Apple doesn’t even allow any other mail clients to be used on the iPhone, and I have a few other complaints about this app (such as, why can’t there be a place to view all mail from all accounts, so I don’t have to manually navigate to the inbox of each account individually). The one way I have found to avoid the frequent inadvertent accessing of all the POP mailboxes is to set mail fetching to manual, then it only fetches the mail from the mail account you are telling it to check (which is really how the application should always work — get mail at the frequency you tell it to, not just when you’re looking at your inbox). Hopefully this helps someone else, and I’m sorry I blamed Yahoo, when it’s clearly Apple’s fault. If someone thinks I’m missing something, please let me know.