Yahoo

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Revision as of 22:22, 9 October 2011 by Tanstaafl (talk | contribs)
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This article was written for Thunderbird but also applies to Mozilla Suite / SeaMonkey (though some menu sequences may differ).


Yahoo! provides a free POP and SMTP server if you have a webmail account in a non-USA yahoo domain (for example de.yahoo.com). If you are in the USA and you want a Yahoo POP account your choices are:

  • Use an extension such as the Webmail extension. The problem is that extensions like that "scrape the screen" in order to emulate a POP server. They frequently break when the format of a webmail page changes, are slow, and hard to debug.
  • Have an ISP that provides that feature for free. AT&T frequently does that for example.
  • Pay for an upgrade to Yahoo! Mail Plus.
  • Change "Regional Site and Language" in Yahoo Webmail's account settings to Yahoo Asia, and then enable POP access in the POP & Forwarding section in Webmail options. You still keep your existing email address and it doesn't change what language you use. See this article or this YouTube video for instructions. Yahoo might disable this feature some day, but its been working for about a year.

Yahoo also has a free IMAP and SMTP server that officially supports smartphones and Zimbra email clients. While its not officially supported by Mozilla, it works fine for most users if you use Thunderbird 3.1 or later. Thunderbird QA says Yahoo IMAP is not supported yet and discourages its use while waiting for Yahoo to provide a officially supported configuration. However, many people use it and its configuration has been added to the Mozilla database that the account wizard uses.

Create a new account by pressing the Add Mail Account button in Tools -> Account Settings -> Account Actions. It should default to creating a POP account with a SMTP server. If your ISP provides you a Yahoo account it may use mail servers with a different domain and use the full email address as the username. Otherwise configure it as follows (if you're not relying upon the account wizard to do this for you):

POP

  • Type: POP
  • Server Name: pop.mail.yahoo.com or plus.pop.mail.yahoo.com if you are using Yahoo! Mail Plus
  • User Name: Just the portion of the email address to the left of the '@'
  • Port: 995
  • Secure connection: SSL/TLS
  • Secure authentication: normal password

You used to be able to use the mail server for your domain (such as pop.mail.yahoo.de) but that broke. A email address in a different domain will still work using pop.mail.yahoo.com.

SMTP

  • Server Name: smtp.mail.yahoo.com
  • User Name: Just the portion of the email address to the left of the '@'
  • Port: 465
  • Secure connection: SSL/TLS
  • Secure authentication: normal password

Its also possible to use port 587 with secure connection set to none.

IMAP

  • Type: IMAP
  • Server Name: imap.mail.yahoo.com
  • User Name: Just the portion of the email address to the left of the '@'
  • Port: 993
  • Secure connection: SSL/TLS
  • Secure authentication: normal password

If you want a IMAP account you need to press the Manual Config button so that you can select IMAP and change the mail server.

The IMAP settings used to work fine. However, several people have run into a problem where Thunderbird will only find new mail in the inbox when it starts. [1] If you get new mail later on and press the "Get Mail" button, open the folder, or wait until "Check for new mail every X minutes" is supposed to check for new mail it frequently doesn't find any, or may take a very long time to do so. This doesn't seem to be a version specific problem.

Yahoo has multiple mail servers, intended for different clients. imap.mail.yahoo.com is the generic one, zimbra.imap.mail.yahoo.com is meant for the Zimbra email client, winmo.imap.mail.yahoo.com for Windows Mobile smart phones, and android.imap.mail.yahoo.com for android smart phones. If you run into this problem use either android.imap.mail.yahoo.com or zimbra.imap.mail.yahoo.com.

If you change the mail server for an existing account that automatically changes the local directory setting (where files are stored). So if you want to do that look at Tools -> Account Settings -> Yahoo -> Server Settings -> Local Directory beforehand, copy it, and then restore it afterwards using the Browse button. This setting is near the bottom of the pane.

IMAP works differently

IMAP accounts let you access all of the webmail folders. It treats folders on the mail server (remote folders) as if they were local folders, so that you can copy/move messages to/from them.

It has a client-server view of the world rather than a download-centric one. While you can use the folders as if they are local folders it actually only downloads the headers (not the messages) to the mail folder on the hard disk. That means whenever you open a message it fetches it again from the mail server, so its a poor choice if you have a slow Internet connection. Thunderbird 3.0 added support for offline copies of the folders. This is enabled by default in Tools -> Account Settings -> Yahoo -> Synchronization & Storage. They are a useful way to backup the folders or to read messages when working offline but they're ignored when you're working online. There is also a optional IMAP cache but it mainly just caches remote images, not messages.

IMAP accounts support hiding folders you don't want to see by not subscribing them. Thunderbird may automatically subscribe the inbox, sent, and bulk mail folders when it creates the Yahoo IMAP account. It will also automatically subscribe any new folder you create using Thunderbird. You can right click on the account name in the folder pane, select subscribe, and then choose from the list which folders to display. If you don't like the idea of using subscription to manage what folders you see, uncheck Tools -> Account Settings -> Yahoo -> Server Settings -> Advanced -> "Show only subscribed folders".

See also

External links