Members of Yahoo's free e-mail list service are without a clubhouse.

["Mark McCall" <mark@xxxxxxx>]

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2105540,00.html

Members of Yahoo's free e-mail list service are without a clubhouse.

Yahoo! Groups, a collection of discussion lists based on various interests,
has been inaccessible from the online portal's Web site since Monday
morning, Yahoo! spokeswoman Mary Osako confirmed. The outage, noted in a
message on the Yahoo! Groups home page, has prevented millions of members
>from



Osako would not discuss details of the problem, but she said it is
hardware-related.

"We're working aggressively to fix the problem and to institute new
processes to protect against similar incidents in the future," said
Osaka,
adding an apology to Yahoo Groups users.

An outage on the group e-mail service affects a broad audience. Yahoo
Groups
drew about 9.5 million unique visitors in January, according to Net
measurement company Jupiter Media Metrix.

The service's existence is the result of Yahoo!'s acquisition of eGroups in
summer 2000, when it paid roughly $432m in stock for the list-hosting
company. At the time, the service had roughly 17 million members and
800,000
e-mail lists.

Yahoo! is in the process of merging its Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! Clubs, a
similar but Web-based community that uses online posting and instant chat
to
communicate.

Yahoo! said it started integrating the services two weeks ago and plans to
have the project finished by the end of March. Osako said the outage is
unrelated to the combination of the services.

But with impending changes, some Yahoo! Groups users say the service has
become increasingly unreliable and inundated with advertisements.

"Some of the groups require quick transfer of information or it would
become
worthless," Craig Ochs, who lives in Brookfield, Wisconsin, said in an
e-mail. Ochs is the moderator of an aviation-related group that trades
information about security breaches and business news in real time.
"Yahoo!
has been less than reliable, and rumors abound about them starting to
charge
for the service. Ahhhh, Yahoo!"

Osako said the company does not have plans to start charging for its groups
service.

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