It is no secret that my hopes were dashed when Microsoft and Yahoo could not come to terms. After all, my nickname is definitely not "Yahoo fanboy" and a proposed merger might actually help against the evil Google beast. But what about all of this fuss about email accounts? I disagree with the idea that my email address name is more important than some other features.

First and foremost - spam - is central to anyone's email adderess. I get thousands of spam messages a day. Gmail is the only account capable of stripping out the majority of the messages. My yahoo email account drowns in the garbage. Therefore, fix the spam problem first.

Second, and just as important to spam, is the interface. Stephen Shankland sums up the mail programs challenges best in his blog entry "Yahoo mail hopes to lure users with ymail" -- by bringing forward the three year "redesigning" of the interface. Does it really take three years? Maybe Yahoo should focus on speed of the pages loading.

Third, and very annoying, is the advertising on the page. I do not need to give up a huge area of my browser to a block ad. These ads should go. Get rid of em!

Fourth, have you loaded the page using a Tablet PC in portrait mode? Obviously not. The page sucks. I hate scrolling to the right because the page design is flawed.

Combined, these four challenges are more important than having a good email name. Fix these - and I'd proudly use my Yahoo.com more often. Until then, I'll keep using my Gmail one.