Unlike Gmail which provides you with both POP3 and IMAP support and Windows Live Hotmail which provides access to Hotmail account using Live Desktop Mail or Outlook Connector for Microsoft Outlook ^[1] free Yahoo mail accounts are not accessible using regular desktop clients. Yahoo does provide with POP3 support if you purchase their premium mail package.

I have Free email accounts from Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo and like to access all the accounts at one place, though I do not exactly fancy the Yahoo mail service for the lack of proper spam filtering, the account has been the oldest one I have and some of my friends still use the email address it to contact me.

Having to logon to a web browser every time for Yahoo is best option you have but what if you want to check your free Yahoo email account from a desktop client?

In this post we will not only see how to access your Yahoo! mail using a desktop client but also how you can easily filter and let through only important emails so that you are not downloading spam too often.

YPOPs for Windows

YPOPs ^[2] is a free software that allows you to access your free Yahoo! mail account both from your favorite desktop client. YPOPs acts like a POP proxy server between your desktop client and Yahoo! mail account and converts you messages to POP3 so that it can be easily ready by your desktop client.

In addition to downloading emails you can also use YPOPs to replay and send new emails using your desktop client.

Installation

Installation is a fairly easy affair. Visit the YPOPs site ^[2] and choose your download location. Once you have download the software, double click on the downloaded file and follow the instructions to install it.

Once you have finished installation start the YPOPs software, you will see a green globe icon with a email envelope on it in the taskbar.

Configuring YPOPs

To configure the software click on the globe icon with the email envelope and agree to their license agreement. After you have agreed to the license agreement right click on the green icon once more and choose configure option.

You will get a new window that takes you through the configuration menu. In this page there are various options, we’ll go through it one by one and see what needs to be configured.

Receiving Emails

In this option you can choose your options to receive the emails from your free Yahoo! mail account. You can choose to download all emails or only unread emails in this option. Here you can also setup how many emails you want to download per send receive cycle.

Download Folders

If you have segregated your emails into numerous folders you can choose this option to download all the emails from the folders, to do that add the name of the folder you want to download emails from and click on the Add button.

Sending Emails

In this option you can choose whether you want to save the emails you send using your desktop client into your Yahoo mail sent folder.

You can setup other options such as how long you want the session with Yahoo mail to last, which port should YPOPs work on, whether you have any proxy servers that YPOPs should use to connect to the Internet, whether you want to store logs of what YPOPs does and other options such as whether you want to start YPOPs when windows starts etc.

Configuring Your Desktop Client

Once you have downloaded, installed and configured YPOPs it is time to configure your desktop client to download emails from you free Yahoo mail account. For this example we will use Windows Live Desktop to configure a new Yahoo account.

• Open Windows Live Desktop Mail.
• In the left panel click on Add an e-mail account or go to Tools -> Accounts and click on Add and select E-mail account before selecting next.
• In the new window add your full Yahoo email address such as example@yahoo.com ^[3] and enter your password.
• Enter a Display Name you want your outgoing mails to have.
• At the bottom of the window check the box next to Manually configure server settings for e-mail account and click on next.
• Choose POP3 as your protocol and enter 127.0.0.1 as your Incoming server leave the port as it is.
• In here once again change you Login Id to your full email address.
• In the outgoing server enter 127.0.0.1 and leave the port as it is.
• Select the checkbox my outgoing server requires authentication and click on next.
• In the final window click on Finish.

Once you have followed the instructions you will see a new email account in Windows Desktop Mail. Clicking on send receive will now also download emails from your free Yahoo mail account.

To get instructions on setting up your free Yahoo mail account in other desktop clients such as Outlook 2003, Thunderbird etc visit the official instructions page ^[4].

Now you can enjoy the leisure of your desktop to check emails from your free Yahoo mail account.

Bonus Tip

Every time I check my Yahoo email, it contains tons of spam which I would not like to download. Following this small trick you can avoid all the spam and only get the important emails you want to download to your desktop client.

• Setup filters in your free Yahoo mail account to move messages from certain senders or with certain subjects to a particular folder.
• In the YPOPs configuration go to the folder option and uncheck Inbox and Trash option.
• Add the folders you created the filter for to be downloaded by YPOPs using the add folder option.

Once you have done this you will be assured that your desktop client will only download emails that are important to you from your free Yahoo mail account.

Was this tip useful to you? What do you think of this trick, do let me know about your views through your comments. Do you have any other questions? You can contact me ^[5] anytime and I would be glad to help you out. I will be looking forward to hearing them.