iOS Calendar not syncing with Yahoo

I keep meaning to leave Yahoo.

I’ve used it for my personal account for probably 15 years now, and pay $30-ish a year for the privilege (well, I get more than that in use out of it, and I hate ads enough for that).

The webmail is fine, the spam filter is very good, but their behind-the-curve approach to security and constant calendar syncing issues are a pain. I plan to move at least our calendar to Google, but keep being put off by the obvious privacy implications of having Google index,well, our entire lives!

My partner and I also use Yahoo for our Joint mail and calendar account, which we use for family matters, and also our joint calendar. This syncs to our phones, so we can book in family events and have them magically appear in each others’ schedules.

 

At least, that’s the theory….

In practice, the joint Yahoo calendar causes more relationship strife than any other single issue!

 

The cause of these problems, is that Yahoo calendar continually fails to sync on my wife’s iPhone (and mine, until I switched to Android). It re-prompts her for a password, and being the impatient type, she cancels it. As a result, the calendars never sync, and all the entries that she puts in the calendar (using “my system”) are ones I’m unaware of, and when I double-book something, then of course its “my fault”.

I finally spent a few minutes investigating this issue, and found these threads.  One quote stood out:

This problem in Yahoo mail comes when the number of mails on the server are large, either from the sent folder or trash or inbox or draft. This large load increases the server login time and it asks for the password.

I guess this could explain why it often asks for a password, when the password hasn’t changed. While it’s an easy fix (“Just enter the password!”), it’s one that gets skipped in day-to-day life, with resulting problems. It’s also symptomatic of what seems to be an insufficient investment or approach by Yahoo in the fundamentals of their infrastructure.

I guess the upside of this, is that if Yahoo are too disorganised to maintain their infrastructure properly, they’re probably also too disorganised to exploit my information effectively as Google would (Yeah, right!).

And so, I move from Yahoo to Google…… soon… someday…