The first problem is you're relying on a free service with no contractual support agreements. It's hard to complain too much. ;) Even your ISP or hosting account's mail service is preferable to the free services because of this.

If this mail is in any way important to your livelihood it would be better to run it through a paid e-mail provider. Use a Bayesian filtering system that you can train like POPFile and store the mail on your local machine.

If you're still keen on the idea of having the Gmail or Yahoo webmail interface you could still forward copies of mail to these accounts as a backup.

It's not really a complaint about them not offering me good email. I have total flexibility to switch from one to another and I use many apps. I'm not relying on Y! or G for my living. I have several dedicated servers, pay a company to handle certain type of email and use all these services extensively.

The Yahoo thing does concern me though because if my server's emails don't arrive to Yahoo, that means some of my customers who use my webapps may not get the emails either.

The reason I posted here is that I know both Yahoo and Google watch this forum and I was hoping it could prompt them to fix the bugs.

Then it's a question of just how much Yahoo and Google learn from the spam that is reported. My experience has shown me that it's not all that much for individual accounts. They may be learning on an aggregate scale for all their users' spam, but I'm not really sure that applies to each account. Something I consider spam you might want in your inbox.

I've done my fair share of reporting spam and removing real messages from the trash of both Yahoo and Gmail accounts. Sometimes it seems that they never learn. Gmail at least seems to be making efforts in the right direction with this. I've nearly given up on Yahoo in this regard.

I agree with almost everything you said. But it amazes me that they don't let us have a whitelist for our own emails and that they don't whitelist their own domains. If I were them, that would embarrass me.

I really used to like Hotmail's settings. They used to have an option where you would only receive mail from addresses in your contact list. For years my Hotmail account was the cleanest one I had. I can't seem to find that setting anymore. That was the ultimate white-list.

Gmail and Yahoo do white-list their own domains to a certain extent. They both use DomainKeys to sign outgoing mail. I know that Gmail uses SPF, but I'm not sure that Yahoo does. These measures alone should improve the relevancy of their filters, or at least allow them to raise flags for user action. The problem with both of these systems is that the user doesn't get to fiddle with the advanced areas of the use of these technologies.

I have come across a number of cases on non-delivery of automated messages from fault reporting systems not being delivered by Hotmail and Yahoo.

That's good to know. Hmm, maybe I should double check if my domain got on a blacklist just to be sure. Anyone know how to do that?