POP your Yahoo! Mail

(The Star, Tuesday April 17, 2007)

Many long years ago (actually, prior to 2002), Yahoo! allowed access to its Yahoo! Mail service via POP3.

This meant users could read their mail using e-mail programs such as Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, or Eudora.

Unfortunately, the company decided to disable its free POP3 access sometime in 2002, and now only provides POP3 access to premium users.

As stated on the Yahoo! Mail help page: "The ability to access Yahoo! Mail via a POP3 e-mail client (such as Outlook or Outlook Express) is only available to customers of our premium Yahoo! Mail Plus service.

If you have not purchased the Yahoo! Mail Plus service, you will be unable to retrieve messages via an e-mail client." Well, that's not true.

The fact is you can still use your favourite e-mail programs with Yahoo! Mail if you run YPOPs, a free and open-source program which translates webmail on-the-fly to the POP3 format.

BROWSER NOT REQUIRED: You can still read your Yahoo! Mail in your preferred mail program with YPOPS.

But before I proceed with this review of YPOPs, there are a few of things you should know.

Firstly, I've grown less dependent on Yahoo! Mail, mainly because I signed up with a commercial e-mail provider a few years ago.

Secondly, Yahoo! Mail faces stiff competition from Google's Gmail service, which still offers free POP3 access.

And finally, Yahoo! insists on using exclamation marks in their company and product names, so relax, dear reader, I am not shouting at you.

POP3 via the Web

YPOPs acts as a e-mail proxy which sits in between your e-mail program and Yahoo!'s website.

So instead of connecting to Yahoo!, your e-mail program connects to YPOPs, which in turn logs on to your Yahoo! Mail account without launching a web browser, reads your mailbox and translates the contents to POP3 mail.

When launched, YPOPs takes up about 5.2MB of RAM and just sits unobtrusively in the system tray; even its icon can be turned off — YPOPs has a "hide tray icon" option.

YPOPs doesn't have a progress bar or animated icon, so you can only find out if it is working by checking your e-mail program's status box (see image).

The YPOPs webpage has guides on how to set up the program to work with most major e-mail programs.

This basically involves setting your POP3 server to 127.0.0.1 or Localhost instead of Yahoo!'s servers.

The program has a multitude of configuration options (see image).

For example, you can choose to delete downloaded mail off the Yahoo! server (or not), download bulk mail (spam), or download mail only from specific folders, plus YPOPs also has support for web proxies.

In one week of testing, YPOPs retrieved hundreds of messages off my Yahoo! account, some with large attachments.

Impressively, YPOPs can also send e-mail through your Yahoo! Mail account, in effect, acting as an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) proxy.

It even provides the option to save sent mail in your Yahoo! Mail "Sent Items" folder.

Challenges

While YPOPs works remarkably well, it isn't a 100% substitute for a true POP3 e-mail service.

For instance, it won't work when Yahoo!'s webmail is unavailable, or when the server produces error pages.

Now this is beyond the control of YPOPs, but in my experience, Yahoo!'s webmail tends to go down more often than most POP3 e-mail providers.

Fortunately, YPOPs fails gracefully, and doesn't lose any messages if it encounters problems with Yahoo!'s webmail servers.

Another drawback for YPOPs is when Yahoo! issues a "challenge screen" or Captcha (an acronym for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart") when you try to send out certain types of e-mail, or if you try to email too many people at once.

Although this only happens occasionally, that means YPOPs can't send out the e-mail, and you will need to log onto Yahoo! Mail to solve the Captcha (see image).

YPOPs can't handle Captchas.

To be fair, Captchas are designed to foil automated software, so one should not expect YPOPs to handle them.

YPOPs! does support attachments, but note that the restrictions imposed for Yahoo! Mail apply here as well.

For instance, Yahoo! allows a maximum 10MB of attachments when sending and receiving e-mail.

Conclusion

I must confess that I'm amazed that YPOPs even works, and not only that, it does its job efficiently.

If you have messages in Yahoo! Mail that you would prefer to read in your favourite e-mail program, then you can't go wrong with YPOPs.

The program is lightweight, configurable, and does all that it claims to do; plus, you can't complain about its price.

The alternative would be to sign up for Yahoo! Mail Plus which would cost you US$20 (RM70) a year.

Pros: Free; lots of configuration options; reliable.

Cons: Can't deal with Captchas and webmail outages.

Download : http://ypopsemail.com/