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. 

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.

New Yahoo Mail

I got an email from Yahoo about upgrading the account to the new beta service. Signed up for it because it seemed inevitable. The new look UI is refreshing and fast. They added a lot of features, competing with Gmail. However, after being spoilt by Google, I want more. For instance, there is no way to filter a set of emails based on an existing email. My inbox already has thousands of emails, thanks to the spam masters and I want to clean up now. For that, Iwant to move my important emails by selecting them and moving to a different folder. In Gmail, it is simple, by selecting the required email and creating a filter based on it. Couldn't figure out an easy way in Yahoo yet.

Fund Transfer using ICICI banking

ICICI net banking requires adding the payee account details for Fund transfer. However the only way to add an account number is by searching the City and then the Bank, Branch and so on. There is no way now to add the bank by the IFSC number or the MICR number.

The problem with this is the inconsistent database of Cities/Banks/Branches.

I wanted to add my Motherś HDFC bank account number and had a nightmare figuring out the correct Bank and branch. The account is in HDFC Kadavanthra, Ernakulam branch.

Weird thing is that you need to search Ernakulam, Kochi, Cochin to find out all the banks in Ernakulam. No luck.

Finally after finding the IFSC code of the Kadavanthra branch (after some googling), I found out the correct branch. And it turns out that the address listed is wrong.

Hereś how to add a HDFC Kadavanthra Branch to ICICI Payee:

Select Add Payee

Search for city ¨Ernakulam¨ -Validate

Select Ernakulam,Kochi from the list

Find Banks

Select HDFC Bank

Select Mather Square, with IFSC:HDFC0000295, MICR:68224004

Filtering search results on Craigslist

I started looking for a new rental house around Bangalore found that Craigslist, Click.in, Sulekha to be good. However the Craigslist was deluged with ads by agents. I did not want to avail the service of an agent, so created a search string by adding negative filters. Hereś how to go about: Usually the agents post a lot of ads and each one would have a contact number. In the search string, you can add - to filter out all the ads containing the same number. You can keep on adding such numbers/names and quickly get the posts done by the owners. It was very effective, as i was able to bring down the results to a few tens from hundreds.

sample search string:

sarjapur -990123456 -80123456