I signed up for Microsoft Google Alerts a few weeks back to follow the possible purchase of Yahoo (too bad) and forgot to take off the alert.  As a result, I am learning tons and tons about Microsoft daily.

Today,  I got the following alert:

So I am thinking - cool, maybe they have something here…As a gmail user, I figure maybe I can catch a few vanity emails for fun to have in addition to my gmail account.

Not only does the link to the alert take me to an ad that requires you to click to skip or wait 15 seconds (good for the publisher but I am sick of them) the email isn’t available from Yahoo yet.  The article leads with :

“Yahoo is offering two new e-mail domains for free to users in addition to its familiar @yahoo.com handle. The two new e-mail domains, @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com, are calculated to increase the number of people registering for free e-mail addresses with Yahoo.”

I get excited and figure I’d better hurry up and get my truman@ymail.com email address so I type “ymail.com” into my browser and low and behold I get a brilliant message:

WTF kind of stupid message is this?  “Bummer…”  It’s like a 60 year old told a 22 year old programmer to sit down with him/her and come up with some cool message that can be displayed.  This is what they came up with?  It’s nothing personal???  “My hot little hands…”  What, you think you are cool?  Wow..

Here’s the stats on the number of users for the top 3 for those who are interested:

 ”According to a comScore Inc. report from April 2008 cited by AP, Yahoo has the largest share of e-mail users at 266 million worldwide. Microsoft is second with 264 million users. Google ranks behind both with 101 million users on Gmail.”