To judge from the high number of dissatisfied users here, my experience seems to have been unique! But I have to say Yahoo CS has done for me exactly what I wanted but did not expect.

I could not get their 'Find People on Yahoo!' utility to work. Several people in China had sent me their Yahoo! IDs but I couldn't find any of them; all my searches delivered zero matches. So I sent an email to Yahoo Customer Service setting out exactly what I had tried to do, and got an automated reply which told me to do exactly what I had been doing. This was not very promising.

However I discovered that the Chinese IDs worked fine in IM, and I subsequently had excellent chats - fully operational webcams - with my friends in China. But Find People still didn't find them.

So I replied politely to the computer, pointing out that I had been doing exactly what they recommended, and this time I got a response which was obviously from a human being. He asked me to mail back one of the IDs I had been searching for so they could try it themselves, and I did so. I also mentioned that the IDs had worked fine in IM.

Finally I got another email from Customer Service to say they were glad to hear that I was now making contact with the people I wanted, AND that they had reported my difficulty as a bug, and would mail me when it had been fixed.

From start to finish took about three days and, considering that I am probably six or seven time zones away from them, I think that is very reasonable. They listened to my problem, then replicated it, and then set a bugfix process in motion. To me, as a man who has spent 25 years writing software, that was a respectable and professional response from a CS department.

So all I can suggest is that you use email rather than phone (clearly their system is not oriented to handling phone calls) and press through the initial automated response. Do not just copy your original email again and again, because although the response text is automated, your mail will in fact be read by a human being, and he needs something new to go on. Give it to him.

Be polite, be very very clear, be brief, and you may get a good result. I hope so.

thain