What Happened to My Yahoo! "Custom Mailbox" and How You Can Avoid It.

Earlier today I noted that my email was inexplicably defaulting to be sent from the wrong email address whenever I replied to or forwarded an email. After working with Yahoo! Mail Plus's customer service (a nice feature worth paying the extra bucks for to have Plus) I figured out what had happened.  As a result, I'm still switching providers since there is no viable remedy, but if you are starting out with a Yahoo Mail Plus account and a "Custom Mailbox", you can avoid getting into the situation I got into.  The story after the jump

I signed up for the "Custom Mailbox" service, which is your own domain name and a set of email addresses to go with it, which integrate right into your Yahoo Mail account. That gave me in essence two Yahoo Mail accounts--my name@yahoo.com account and my @mydomain.com account (mydomain replaces my actual domain for privacy).  I could switch between them at will, and each would pretty much separately.  Like I usually do when I purchase a domain, I made a generic email address as the first email on that domain, so it was admin@mydomain.com.  I then made up another one (name@mydomain.com) and used the feature to put it over my name@yahoo.com email account.  I then created a rule to move all mail addressed to name@yahoo.com to a subfolder, since I never checked that email address anymore due to it being overloaded with spam.  For many months I worked happily with this arangement.  I set up my account to have name@mydomain.com as the default "from" address, and all was good. 

4 months or so ago, the problem started occurring in that whenever i replied to or forwarded a message, it would default to being sent from name@yahoo.com. Their customer service told me that since the primary address on the account was name@yahoo.com, any reply or forward would default to being sent by that address regardless of who the original email was addressed to. That meant that if someone emailed me at name@mydomain.com and I wanted to reply to that email, the reply would automatically be from name@yahoo.com.  Since I didn't use that, I found that I'd had months of replies to replies or forwards sitting in the folder I had no idea I'd recieved.  Customer service said there was nothing they could do since that was the way the system worked and that the only thing I could do was manually choose the correct email address to send from every time I replied to or forwarded an email.  They also said there was no way I could make my name@mydomain.com address the primary address to avoid this. With this inconvenience, I'm dumping my service, and moving to GMail, but you won't have to if you do it correctly.

How to avoid this: 

Yahoo! Mail Plus and Custom Mailbox are great services, and in my opinion worth the yearly fee. If you set it up right. To avoid the mess I got into, just make the primary email the email you want (name@mydomain.com) instead of a generic one (admin@mydomain.com) when you sign up for the service.  That way your new email will be the primary address and you won't have any reply-to or forwarding issues.