Yahoo killed my buzz

So I was having a really good week until today. Billing is coming along nicely for our medicaid project, and the other startup I'm working on will be demoing at the Lake on saturday (I'll post a link on this blog after that date, so that I can get feedback from all of you readers as well).

Unfortunately, today my experience with Yahoo really destroyed that "high-on-life" feeling I'd been having. You see, we had this idea for handling incoming email with the application. I wanted to have users be able to send email to the app that would cause things to happen. So I went to our friendly and efficient hosting provider, EngineYard, and asked them to setup a mailbox for us to accept incoming emails. Like usual, engineyard's customer support got done what we needed and did it with a smile. They then told me through email that in order to start receiving email there I would need to add an MX record to my DNS listing that would make "msg.domain.com" point to their mail server. Basically, I just wanted that subdomain to be redirected, while leaving all regular mail sent to "domain.com" to continue as normal.

Figuring that this would not be an issue, I asked our business expert to take care of it. As the title of this post probably indicates to you, it WAS AN ISSUE. This poor woman spent the first half-hour of this project playing with Yahoo's web interface for their small business registrar system. No dice. She called them and spent half an hour waiting, and then longer actually on the phone with a customer service representative who didn't understand what we were asking for. I got on the next call with her and together we talked with a Yahoo support guy named "Phillip" who told us in an apathetic voice that what we were wanting to do simply wasn't possible.

Bullshit! I'm willing to accept something along the lines of "I don't know how to do that", because there are plenty of things that I don't know how to do. But you're going to say to my face that something is downright impossible you'd better be sure that I'm not going to be able to embarrass you with something as simple as a google search: I have Many Online Resources that say this is a perfectly reasonable request that is implemented in DNS records all over the world all the time. Knowing that I have to demo by Saturday, I'm probably just going to have to work around this by directing all email traffic to the engineyard server and forwarding the regular stuff back to our personal email addresses, so I can get past this, but what a freaking drag!

Long story short, don't be suckered in by Yahoo's low prices for domain names. They will screw you if they get the chance. As soon as this demo is over, we're switching. UPDATE: I just checked, and GoDaddy supports this kind of MX record, so that's who we'll be switching to. I recommend you all do the same.