"Legacy" Yahoo Messenger to Shut Down on August 5

Despite being 18 years old, "Legacy" Yahoo Messenger remains the firm favourite in the bunker industry.

Yahoo Inc. (Yahoo) has announced that from August 5, 2016 it will no longer support its "legacy" Yahoo Messenger (YM) platform.

Despite the emergence of several other messenger tools since it was introduced 18 years ago, Yahoo Messenger remains not only the messenger of choice, but an important business tool for the bunker industry, as well as many others in the wider energy and commodity industries.

"In December of 2015, we announced a brand new Yahoo Messenger for mobile, the Web and in Yahoo Mail on the desktop, built on a new modern platform," Yahoo's statement read.

"While today we provide basic interoperation between the legacy product and the new Messenger, we encourage all of our users to complete their transition to the new Yahoo Messenger as we will no longer support the legacy platform as of August 5, 2016. We intend to continue our focused efforts on the new Messenger, with a goal of delivering the best experience to our users."

Yahoo was not immediately available for further comment on the matter, so while it could not be confirmed exactly what will happen on August 5, tech news site Engadget reported that after this date the system will simply no longer work.

"After August 5th, anyone still using the legacy Messenger will no longer be able to log in or send messages. Same goes for messages sent through third-party apps built on top of Yahoo's API," Engadget wrote.

Archived conversations will also be deleted, it was reported.

New Messenger?

While switching to the "new" messenger platform is Yahoo's recommended course of action, Ship & Bunker's initial investigation indicates the transition could be problematic.

For starters, while Yahoo says it is "working on bringing you a new Yahoo Messenger desktop application for both Windows & Mac," right now there is no replacement desktop tool - only browser-based and mobile apps.

After using "new Yahoo messenger" in a browser, we were unable to stay logged in after a short period of inactivity.

When using the browser-based messenger (messenger.yahoo.com), Ship & Bunker found that the existing "legacy" login details worked, but we were unable to send messages to our contacts who were using the legacy messenger.

We were also logged out after a short period of inactivity; "To protect your account, you need to confirm your password periodically," was the explanatory message.

For the mobile apps, industry sources Ship & Bunker spoke to Tuesday had even less success, with some indicating they could not access their existing contact lists.

But there could also be bigger barriers to a bunker industry switch to the new messenger.

While the legacy system stores conversations locally, the new system is completely cloud based, meaning conversations are only stored remotely.

This means keeping a definitive record of what has been said, or has been deleted, will be much more difficult, a factor that may prove a step too far for compliance officers already not overly enthusiastic about tens of millions of dollars of business being conducted over the platform.

So what now? While there is no clear direction for the industry to take, Skype, QQ, and ICE Instant Messenger have all been touted as possible replacements for Yahoo, as well as messaging tools from Reuters and Bloomberg.

WhatsApp, rated by Statista as world's most popular messaging platform, is also a strong contender, especially given that last month it launched a desktop version of its popular cross-platform mobile messaging app.

Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and LinkedIn's chat tools are also possibilities.