Get Yahoo Mail in Outlook, Thunderbird and other mail clients

The free Yahoo Mail service is not offering Pop3 access to your mails. Pop3 access means that you can use a desktop email client like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird to access your Yahoo Mail account instead of having to use the Yahoo website. Only Yahoo Mail Plus, which costs $19.99 a year is offering Pop3 access. There are however other ways and I’m going to show you how you can access your Yahoo Mail account with desktop email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird without having to upgrade or pay for a software.

We are going to use a software called YPOPs! - POP3/SMTP Access to Yahoo which acts as a proxy on your system. It basically works like this. You setup the Yahoo account in your mail client like you would normally do. The only difference is that you do not add Yahoo Mail Pop3 and SMTP servers but a link to localhost instead.

YPOPS! listens there and acts as a proxy to retrieve and send mail using an email client and Yahoo Mail. In Thunderbird you use the following information after installing YPOPS!:

Your Name: Obvious, ain’t it ?
Email Address: Your Yahoo Email address
Type of Incoming Server: Pop
Incoming Server: 127.0.0.1
Incoming User Name: Your Yahoo Email address

Settings for outgoing mail (SMTP) are almost the same:

Server Name: 127.0.0.1
Use name and password: Yes
User Name: Your Yahoo Email address

That’s it. Settings in Outlook and other mail clients are virtually the same. Thanks to the How to Geek for finding the software.