I've been doing IT for many years now and I have honestly never heard of any real issues as you mentioned in your post related to what his problem was. As long as you have the right settings entered for the e-mail provider, the app should work fine. Yahoo mail is very easy to setup in any app since the settings are found by the app almost every time since it's so common, and it would be a rare case that you would have to enter them manually. Also, MS Outlook is always preferred over the others, especially since most people have used it since the beginning when MS Office first took over.
As you mentioned, many are moving over to Gmail because they like settings to save in Chrome and on their Android devices.