How to access Yahoo! Mail using POP3 for free

While a number of free webmail services including Gmail offers users POP3 or IMAP access for use with an external mail applications like Outlook or Thunderbird, Yahoo! considers this a premium feature and requires you to pony up $20 a year for POP3 access. Paying customers also get some other nifty features like an ad-free interface. But if you just want to use Outlook to send and receive email, YPOPs! can help.

YPOPs! is a free and open source application that provides POP3 and SMTP access to free Yahoo! Mail accounts. it does this by basically setting up a server on your desktop. The program acts like a go-between that lets Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, Opera, or other mail applications talk to the Yahoo! Mail server. It does this by communicating with the server using HTTP and then setting up a POP3 server on your desktop to talk to your email application. As such, it’s not technically a violation of Yahoo!’s terms of service. Or at least, that’s what the developers claim.

YPOPs! offers instructions for configuring a number of email clients to work with the program. Outlook 2007 wasn’t listed, and when I tried configuring YPOPs! to work with Outlook 2007 I was unable to properly connect to the server.

[via Online Tech Tips]