I’m a long time Yahoo Mail user. Just to illustrate how long I’ve been with them: when I joined the space available was a couple of MBs! I staid with them because I was mostly satisfied (never really caught the GMail bug), however recently I started looking for options to consolidate the different email accounts (work / personal / yahoo / gmail / etc). I explicitly wanted IMAP support because I really need to keep in sync between multiple machines.

The common wisdom seems to be on the ‘net that Yahoo! Mail doesn’t support IMAP (not even for paid accounts) or that various hacks are needed to support it (like sending custom / non-standard commands after login). This information however seems to be outdated, since I was able to find a least 3 IMAP servers (I’ve tested them all and they all work – with standard email clients with no hacks!):

• imap.mail.yahoo.com (this is the one Thunderbird configures by default)
• winmo.imap.mail.yahoo.com (from this article)
• zimbra.imap.mail.yahoo.com

All of the servers support SSL/TLS encryption, so they are safe to access even from public hotspots. The outgoing server is smtp.mail.yahoo.com, which also supports SSL/TLS (and you should use it!)

The easiest to set up is Mozilla Thunderbird, however Evolution seems to work much better. One important feature in particular is that it works with large (10 000+ emails) folders, while Thunderbird chokes with an error (“UNAVAILABLE] UID FETCH too many messages in request”). To have Evolution work properly, you need to select “IMAP+” (also called IMAPX) as the protocol.

HTH somebody out there.

Enter delicious (or del.icio.us as it was formerly known): it has a nice Firefox plugin and theoretically it can post your bookmarks automatically to your blog. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work with Blogger :-(. (an other qualm of mine with delicious is that – even though it was bought by Yahoo several years back, user accounts weren’t migrated, so there is yet another account to create – no OpenID). I found a workaround to the problem here: Post Delicious Bookmarks to Your Blog. The basic steps are:

1. “Burn” your delicious feed with Feedburner (given that both Blogger and Feedburner are owned by Google, you already have an account for both).
2. Enable email subscriptions to your feed (Publicize -> Email subscriptions). If you keep getting errors while you try to do this, go into your Gmail account and perform some cleanup – it seems that if you have an inactive Gmail account, you will get errors).
3. Enable email posting on your blog (Blogger dashboard -> Settings -> Email & Mobile). Make sure that you use a complex email address and that you check the “Save emails as draft posts” option.
4. Now subscribe with your blogger address to the feed! You should get a confirmation email (which will appear as a draft post). Click on the link in it and delete the post. That’s it! In 24 hours you should start to see the new bookmarks appearing.

One problem with this approach is that you will get the entire header/footer with every post. Besides being annoying, this exposes the unsubscribe link, which means that arbitrary visitors can unsubscribe your address, thus breaking the process! I’ve put together the following bookmarklet: Delicious format! When you have a delicious draft, edit the post and use this bookmarklet. It will remove the header and footer. Additionally it will try to convert links which it detects into proper anchor tags.

Update: added support for entries which contain only one bookmark (they don’t have the initial list of elements).

Update: Changed the bookmarklet again, to adapt to the changing email format…

Comes the following video about Yahoo Mail:

I got started on Yahoo Mail back in the day and it always served me well. Thank you!

PS: Cat and dog saying Yahoo Mail