Yahoo mail "offline". How to restore back to online?

Frostbyte, Thank you for your reply.. Yes, extremely frustrating for both of us and I'd imagine many others! Having to shut down a computer to fix a problem that shouldn't even be one, is extremely disconcerting to say the least! My drives are also an SSD drive. Not sure the type of drive would make any difference anyway. I'll try your suggestion of "When Yahoo mail shows the "No Internet Connection" popup box click on anything else in the Yahoo controls under the address bar. "Home", "News", etc. That will force a re-connection to the Yahoo servers. Then click on "Mail" to go back to email. The email connection to Yahoo will be reestablished and you can proceed as normal. Watch what opens because this may load another tab with Mail in it. You can close that tab and just go back to Mail in the original tab." This will at least forego the necessity of having to shut down the computer and re-start. The next time I have this problem I'll try what you suggested and report back with the result.
Thanks again for your response to this vexing problem.

Deaf Dave said:

Frostbyte,....Not sure the type of drive would make any difference anyway.

I'm sure the type of drive has nothing to do with this problem. I was just using that as an example of the kind of useless advice given by some well meaning people because they're trying to solve something besides the problem at hand.

Try that workaround, rebooting is a PITA. I'd be interested to see if it works for you. The "No Internet Connection" thing is so sporadic that you may not get a chance to try that for days. It may turn out that there's nothing more than a workaround that can be done.

If this is indeed Yahoo's fault they're notorious for not fixing anything and at the same time giving us useless features we have no desire for. Yahoo is a bunch of dilettantes but we're stuck with them if we want to use Yahoo Mail. I've tried to work with them to resolve problems in the past and gotten nowhere.

It may also turn out that this is something in the way the browser settings work. If that's the case, we should be able to find and fix that eventually. I'm looking into the settings for selecting tab deactivation when not in use, for one thing. I'm not real hopeful that's the issue because then the tab should activate and reconnect when it's selected. However, I can't think of anything else at the moment so I'm trying to find that setting and tell it never to deactivate Yahoo Mail. Then I'll have to test it, which means waiting for the error to occur. So a test can go for quite a while before I'm comfortable I fixed it.

I've also noticed that the problem goes away if I do a forced cache dump and full reload of the tabbed page. In Firefox you do that by holding down CTRL and tapping "R", or "F5" or clicking the refresh control in the browser, (the little circle/arrow on the browser controls). Just FYI, this is different in Chrome, in Chrome you hold down the SHIFT key instead of the CTRL key. You might try that and see if it works for you too.

Doing a forced cache dump and refresh of the page displayed only affects the page that is being used. It compels the browser to dump any caching on that page and grab a fresh page load from the server.

Thank you for your expeditious reply. The main reason why I will keep Yahoo mail is because of their huge storage capacity (1TB) which other email providers do NOT have! In fact, I had to find a way to increase the storage capacity of Outlook (to 100 GB) because of the meager capacity they had. Other third party email providers have almost no capacity! Having said that, I will not use Chrome because I don't trust it. I trust Firefox 100% and also like their addons and extensions! As you mentioned, the "no internet" popup happens very sporadically. Sometimes it doesn't happen for days and sometimes more than once a day! Extremely frustrating! They must have someone there that is able to permanently FIX this problem! A troglodyte like me and I'm sure many others have to rely upon people way above our pay grade to do so. Like you, my main email address has been in use for 20 years and therefore, I don't want to change it. Because of my limited knowledge, I wouldn't even attempt to do a forced cache dump. Thanks for this interesting conversation we are having. Hopefully, at some point in time the problem will eventually be found to have a solution!

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Frostbyte, I hope my comment isn't premature. Apparently you are a genius and kudos are in order! After a few days of not having the "no internet" popup, I finally had one a while ago and by using your "workaround" it 'fixed' the problem without my having to close programs I was working on as well as having to re-start my computer. This is a tremendous relief as well as a huge time saver! . I also commend you for sticking to the relative problem and not going off of tangents as some others sometimes do. I'll report back in about a week with a further update if there are no more problems and sooner if there are. Thank you

Hearsepilot said:

Since you're viewing your mail portal in a browser can you not simply hit F5 to refresh the page?

That does no good because the page won't refresh, presumably because the issue is on the Yahoo Mail server side of the connection. It's not a problem with an automatic page refresh not working. Most of the time that works fine and displays new mail as it arrives. Then for some reason the internet connection from browser window to Yahoo Mail goes down and won't reconnect properly. Refreshing the page does not reconnect the browser to the Yahoo Mail server.

If that was all there was to the problem it wouldn't be an issue.

Generally doing a CTRL-F5 won't force a reconnect either but it's worth trying because it forces a full, fresh reload of the page. If it can reconnect to the server, which it can't.

So far the only reliable ways to do that are the workaround I spelled out for DD. Or to close the browser and wait for it to unload from memory. Which for some reason sometimes takes Firefox a few moments to do and if you don't wait the problem doesn't clear. Or to restart the computer.

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Deaf Dave said:

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Frostbyte, I hope my comment isn't premature. Apparently you are a genius and kudos are in order! After a few days of not having the "no internet" popup, I finally had one a while ago and by using your "workaround" it 'fixed' the problem without my having to close programs I was working on as well as having to re-start my computer. This is a tremendous relief as well as a huge time saver! . I also commend you for sticking to the relative problem and not going off of tangents as some others sometimes do. I'll report back in about a week with a further update if there are no more problems and sooner if there are. Thank you

You're most welcome. I was here looking to see if anyone had found a fix for this failure and when I saw that you had the identical problem but people were not being helpful it was clear you would benefit from what I've discovered so far. Those people are well meaning so I'm not slagging on them but what they said isn't a solution or a fix either. So far all you'd been offered before I came along required a major and unsatisfactory change in the way you do things. Yahoo is a webmail and it should work like a webmail is supposed to. That it does not is not something that can be solved by using it as something besides webmail.

Like I said, what I suggested is NOT a fix but it is a usable workaround. Just FYI or for the edification of others who might read this thread -- A fix is something that eliminates the problem, a workaround is something that mitigates the problem. A fix would mean the problem doesn't recur. A workaround is something to minimize the problem when it does recur.

This "No Internet Connection" issue has been around for a long time and it's not universal to all Yahoo Mail users. It's not even consistent for the people who are experiencing it. Sometimes, as you say, the problem does not crop up for days. Sometimes it happens several times a day. This workaround I discovered through testing is the easiest, quickest way to clear the problem that I've found so far.

I will continue to look for a real fix but I'm not hopeful after all this time. I think this is due to something Yahoo is doing on their end of the connection. Which means Yahoo needs to fix it but clearly they're not motivated to do so.

As for being a 'genius' ... I've been working on IT systems for 40 years so I just happen to have more experience than some of the people that were trying to be helpful.

I never denigrate anyone that takes their valuable time to try to help me solve a problem. As I had mentioned in the beginning of this thread, Outlook still was able to retrieve all my messages from the Yahoo server even when Yahoo was offline. That in itself made me believe it was a Yahoo problem and nothing more. One more thing, your workaround is just about as good as a fix in my opinion because it saves a lot of time.

Deaf Dave said:

Frostbyte, Thank you for your reply.. Yes, extremely frustrating for both of us and I'd imagine many others! Having to shut down a computer to fix a problem that shouldn't even be one, is extremely disconcerting to say the least! My drives are also an SSD drive. Not sure the type of drive would make any difference anyway. I'll try your suggestion of "When Yahoo mail shows the "No Internet Connection" popup box click on anything else in the Yahoo controls under the address bar. "Home", "News", etc. That will force a re-connection to the Yahoo servers. Then click on "Mail" to go back to email. The email connection to Yahoo will be reestablished and you can proceed as normal. Watch what opens because this may load another tab with Mail in it. You can close that tab and just go back to Mail in the original tab." This will at least forego the necessity of having to shut down the computer and re-start. The next time I have this problem I'll try what you suggested and report back with the result.
Thanks again for your response to this vexing problem.

The part in red is what I do. I often get this popup, and just re-clicking on another folder will 99% of the time re-connect to the internet. It happens on all four of my machines.

For quite a while I was getting those "no internet" popups. Sometimes daily and frequently. For the past few days I didn't get any until yesterday. Doing the 'workaround' worked until yesterday when it didn't. No matter which I clicked in the address bar had no effect after multiple attempts. I guess we could call that a 1% failure of the 99% successes! late last night, the workaround worked as suggested. Let's all hope those darn popups just go away!

Deaf Dave said:

For quite a while I was getting those "no internet" popups. Sometimes daily and frequently. For the past few days I didn't get any until yesterday. Doing the 'workaround' worked until yesterday when it didn't. No matter which I clicked in the address bar had no effect after multiple attempts. I guess we could call that a 1% failure of the 99% successes! late last night, the workaround worked as suggested. Let's all hope those darn popups just go away!

Are you using a laptop or a desktop? Are you using a WiFi (wireless) or a hard wired Ethernet connection to your router or modem?

One thing that can cause the intermittent behavior you're describing is that the network adapter goes to 'sleep'. Network adapters on computers ship with "sleep enabled" in their settings. This is some sort of 'green' or 'ecological' nonsense, all the private network adapters on the planet probably don't use a kilowatt of power in a single day. (Note, for huge server farms and other business applications power consumption is likely considerably higher but they shut off the power saving functions before they ever bring a machine into production.) It's a PITA because the network adapter doesn't always 'wake up' when you want or expect it to.

This is one of the first things I disable on any machine I own. I do a lot of remote work both to my own machines and those owned by clients and the last thing I need is a network adapter shutting down and denying me the means to make a connection. So this is already something I've done on my machines but you might not have or not have known about it.

If you don't know how to do that, the setting is in Device Manager and you can search on the internet if you don't want to wait for me. If you want to wait until I respond then I can give you the steps required to disable network adapter power-down but I need to know what operating system (OS) you're using to give you the right information. If it's Windows 10 it's a very easy thing to do requiring about 7 or so mouse clicks.

Of course, if you've already adjusted the network adapter power options then it's probably something else. Let me know if you've done that and I'll see what else I can come up with. My machine never fails to reconnect to Yahoo Mail after I've performed the workaround I told you about.

Frostbyte, I use two desktops (at my desk) and using Win10 Pro 64 bit. Excuse my limited knowledge of nomenclature. Here's my set up: I have a Fiber line coming into my house. That Fiber line is connected to what I call the "fiber box". The fiber box is connected to my Modem via an Ethernet Cat 8 cable. Both computers are connected to the same Modem using Cat 8 cables. I also have a WiFi connected to another desktop in another room of the house via a Tp-Link 'router'.. I have no idea what a network adapter is but assume it may be a program as opposed to a physical piece of hardware. If you would, please post that information as to how to disable the network adapter. Thank you for your continued interest in this exasperating problem even as intermittent as it is.