Yahoo's Valentine's Day messages

I stopped using my Yahoo email quite some time ago. It was my first webmail account (okay, well, technically, it was my second, but Yahoo is still my first webmail provider), but once it started getting cluttered with spam, I decided it was time to move on.

The account still exists, mind you, and I still check it from time to time if for no other reason than to empty it of the accumulated garbage. I recently logged in and did more than empty the garbage. I absolutely purged it, emptying every folder of everything that had accumulated over the past decade or so. I ended up with a nice, clean mailbox.

It was while I was doing the pre-spring cleaning that I discovered the Valentine's Day feature Yahoo has added. A pulsing red-heart icon has been added next to the Compose link, inviting you to autocompose a Valentine's message. Clicking the heart creates a new message. At the bottom of the message pane is a dropdown list from which you can select one of three options: Crazy in Love, Friendly Love or All Outta Love.

Selecting Crazy in Love generated this message:

To my beloved,

Your love is like a warm breeze. You move with the elegance of a soft summer cloud. Your face could launch 1,000 ships. The stars are jealous of your famous sparkle. 

Love forever and a day,

Friendly Love gave me this:

To the best human I know,

You have so many friends, I'm sure you've already received 1,000 Valentines today. You know, I've never even seen you jaywalk! Not once! I know I can always trust you to tell me if I have toilet paper stuck to my shoe. You're fabulous. Did you know that? Well, it's true. 

With love and friendship,

Now that I think about it, it sounds kind of like a dog or an android talking to a person.

And then selecting All Outta Love resulted in the following:

To someone who deserves more,

Enough is enough. Have you ever noticed that cupid rhymes with stupid? Let's celebrate being single since it's obviously way better. It's gonna take more than this silly day to make me cry. 

Tomorrow is a new day,

Since I'm in the process of going through a big relationship status change, the last one kind of struck a chord with me, but that's a story for another day.

Each time you select one of the options, it generates a different random message. Okay, yes, I confess I did sit here for several minutes selecting each option over and over to see what kinds of messages would be created. They're pretty lame, all things considered. If you're going to offer such a feature, at least go into it with a little pizzazz and enthusiasm. Throw some animated gifs in there or some emoticons, at least. I think if I were to send one of these messages to someone in whom I was interested, their likely reaction would be to think me pathetic.

It strikes me that Yahoo is trying to be more like Facebook. And the flashing and provocative ads displaying in the righthand pane are truly absurd. I am quite honestly embarrassed to open my Yahoo mail at work because of the ads that display.

I think absurd is a good word to describe Yahoo mail these days. Sure, it's one of the better free webmail options, but with the intrusive ads and spamming in bulk, I just have to wonder, why bother?