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.

As someone who has seen to many unlimited deals in the past I’m a little bit cautious about their plans. Let us take a little example here. Yahoo has currently around 250 million users that use their mail service. Worst case for Yahoo would be if nearly all of their users decided to use Yahoo Mail to send and store large files such as holiday videos, presentations and high res pictures. Let us assume 1 Gigabyte per month per user which would mean that Yahoo would need 250000 Terrabytes of storage space to keep up with the demands of their users. It is however pretty unrealistic that all users will upload 1 Gigabyte per month.

There are surely many dead accounts and some use it for normal mails only. It remains to be seen how many users will really use it for large attachments and how Yahoo will react if a user decided to draw the unlimited option and send a lot of large files in a short time. Google for instance bans users temporary who upload more than 1 gigabyte to Gmail in a short time. John Cramer, Yahoo Vice-President of mail, put it that way: “We are comfortable that our users are far under 1 gigabyte, on average”

Two countries are excluded from the deal: China and Japan. The new service is supposed to go live this June.