There are two kinds of people in the world: those who keep their ice cube trays filled and those who don’t. (Remember when there were ice cube trays in most freezers?)

So maybe I should update that: are two kinds of people in the world: those who keep their email inbox empty and those who don’t – and I have to admit I’m in the latter demographic.

There, I said it. While my desktops (both physical and digital) are pretty clean (and I like to think that I’m right up there as far as productivity goes), my Yahoo account goes back well into the last century, and my mostly unkempt inbox now has over 9000 emails in it. I know, not exactly best practices – but Yahoo’s recently moved to no limitations on email data storage size, and I’m taking Mr. Yang at his word (and I’ve had clients – Exchange Breakers, I used to call them – with several times that amount of messages in their inboxes).

What made such bad behavior possible was my profound dependence on email search. Since I’m not populating subfolders, I *need* my search functionality – and for several months now, (along with a fair number of other Yahoo users) my email search is broken, only returning matches from the last three weeks or so.

I’ve Googled it - it turns out there are a lot of us out there but not enough to be news-worthy. I’ve sent forms and chats to Yahoo support – I’ve only gotten the generic “this is a known issue, we’ve escalated it” response. If I were paranoid blogger (and I hear that can be a problem out there on these here internets), I could almost convince myself Yahoo is attempting to ‘encourage’ users like me to keep less of our data laying around cluttering up their data centers – but no, I think it’s just another example of the potential downside of having one’s data up the cloud: outages. While what’s happening to me isn’t as scary (or evidently news-worthy) as what happened recently to some Apple MobileMe early adopters (in which the emails were actually lost ).

Cloud computing: collaboration, portability, workstation platform flexibility, lower server and backup costs – a free lunch. That is, until there are host-side issues up there in that cloud. Then the feeling of comfort from having someone in cloud responsible for your data can turn intoa pretty uncomfortable feeling of helplessness, especially when (unlike the Google Apps and Apple MobileMe situations) the issue is not widespread enough to garner media attention and goes unresolved for months.

Meanwhile, I’ve gotten pretty acquainted with that <next> button, having hit it hundreds of times now to page through 9 years’ worth of emails.

Yahoo, thou art bumming me out. Waaah.