“How to Access a Free Yahoo! Mail Account in Mozilla Thunderbird” by Heinz Tschabitscher of About.com is a guide to setting up your Yahoo! Mail account in Thunderbird, an excellent desktop e-mail client from the makers of Firefox.
How It Works
This About.com tutorial gets your Yahoo! Mail running with Thunderbird by having you install a program called YPOPs!. YPOPs is a middle-man — it acts as an intermediary between Mozilla Thunderbird and your Yahoo! Mail account. You then configure Thunderbird to query YPOPs! for new mail from your Yahoo! account.
Other E-mail Clients
YPOPs! is not limited to Mozilla Thunderbird. It is compatible with many other e-mail clients such as Outlook and Evolution.
Drawbacks
According to “POP your Yahoo! Mail” by The Star TechCentral there are a few situations in which YPOPs! may fail that are outside of the program’s control. For example, in certain situations Yahoo! will ask you to fill out a CAPTCHA form before it sends mail.
From time to time, changes made to the Yahoo! Mail service by Yahoo! may cause YPOPs! to malfunction.
A Few Words of Caution
YPOPs! provides POP3 access to your Yahoo! Mail. A POP3 client deletes messages from the server after they have been downloaded by your e-mail client (which in this case would be Mozilla Thunderbird). If you check your mail with Thunderbird/YPOPs! and then log into your Yahoo! Mail account from another location through their webmail interface, the messages you previously read with Thunderbird will no longer present. They will only be available on the computer on which Thunderbird/YPOPs! is running.
If this is not how you want your e-mail to behave, do not follow these About.com instructions for setting up Thunderbird with Yahoo! Mail. POP3 is not for you — what you are looking for is called IMAP.
Yahoo! used to offer POP3 access to e-mail, but discontinued the service in 2002 for all but their paying Yahoo! Mail Plus customers. I do not use Yahoo! mail, and am unaware as to whether using a program such as YPOPs! to circumvent this limitation of their system is against the Terms of Service.
I have contacted the creator of YPOPs and asked the following questions:
- Whether or not using YPOPs is a violation of Yahoo! Terms of Service, and if he has ever heard of someone having their account penalized, disabled or deleted for using YPOPs!.
- Whether YPOPs! indeed deletes e-mail messages from the server after downloading them, as is the case with traditional POP3 e-mail clients.
At this time I am awaiting a response.
