Sunday, September 30, 2012

Yahoo Email stopped working

On 28th September 2012 Friday morning around 10:30am my Yahoo email account stopped receiving new emails. I noticed this behavior immediately because everyday at 10:30 am I receive a bunch of daily update emails from a forum which I am member of. On this particular day, I received only the first email of the series and then stopped. Thereafter I never received any emails on that day. I was hoping that is is an intermittent problem and would get solved soon. But it was not the case and on Saturday also I did not receive any emails. I was supposed to get some important emails and this got me worried. I checked on the net and many folks reported the same in various forums. Finally as advised by someone, I contacted the Yahoo Classic email support by choosing the Live chat option on their support website. Chatted with the support person and after the identity confirmation, they did something to the account and I started receiving emails. But I was shocked to learn that the emails that I was supposed to get for past 2 days will not be retrieved.

Looks like something went wrong with some Yahoo account settings and Yahoo is not yet confirming the fiasco. I don't believe that the account were hacked, as someone else pointed out in the forums, since I did not see any unusual activity in my account. Also, there are emails in spam folder that were received during this period (though some of them could be with wrong 'future' dates')

Update:
Here is how you can contact/chat with the support staff.
Go to help.yahoo.com
Choose "Contact us" tab
Choose "Mail Classic"
Click on the "Live chat" yellow link. There might be backlog so you may have to wait. 

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Indian Income Tax e-filing - An annoying experience

I have been e-filing my income tax returns for many years now. Each year, the MS Excel filing tool (ITR-2) incorporated new features and it is still going through a bug-fixing phase. Hard to believe that just one day to go for the deadline and still new tool is being released! For this year, I have been trying to use the ITR-2 tool from the beginning of July and I downloaded at least 4 versions of the tool from the website.
2012_ITR2_PR14.xls
2012_ITR2_PR16.xls
2012_ITR2_PR18.xls
2012_ITR2_PR21.xls

I do not see any release notes anywhere. Isn't this a basic courtesy to update the users about what was not working and what is being fixed?

Also I could not find any forums discussing the usage and experience of using the tool. Pretty strange.

The latest one as of today is 2012_ITR2_PR21.xls.
Things that does not work:
  1. Import from previous version  -Does not work. This does not work with any versions. I have the data filled up in my previous file - 2012_ITR2_PR18.xls and I am not able to import this data. The message says "Import Ok" but I see no data. Very annoying. This would save a lot of time - re-entering the data from scratch.
  2. In 2012_ITR2_PR18.xls, Calculate Tax - Calculate Interest does not work with 2012_ITR2_PR18.xls This is the reason I tried downloading the latest one.
  3. In 2012_ITR2_PR14.xls, HOUSE_PROPERTY tab had issues when multiple ownership details had to be entered. This seem to be fixed in the later version.