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. Have any of you tried the program and had more luck?

[via Online Tech Tips]

Yahoo! has been talking about ways that the company can use social networking-style features to improve the email inbox. Now the company is rolling out a minor update to Yahoo! Mail that could certainly save you a lot of time and hassle, because it lets you sort your email messages so that you only wind up seeing emails from your contacts.

Here's how it works. First, you have to set up a Yahoo! profile by visiting profiles.yahoo.com. Yahoo! will scan your existing list of email contacts and suggest users that you might want to make "connections" with. Once you invite those users to be your connections, and they accept, they'll show up as connections. And then you can click the "From Connections" button in your inbox to only see messages from people you actually know.

This should help cut down on the amount of spam, bacn (does anyone still user that term?) and other less than urgent emails you have to deal with on a daily basis.

[via CNET]

Yahoo! is shutting down online video editing site Jumpcut next month. This week the company rolled out a few tools allowing users to download their original video files and rendered projects from the site.

The easy part is download your "assets," which includes the original video clips, photos, audio, and other elements you uploaded to the site. Jumpcut is now offering users links for downloading these assets one at a time or in one large ZIP file.

If you want to save the videos that you've already mixed and edited, you'll need to download the JumpOut! movie renderer for Windows. This tool lets you navigate through your saved videos and select a movie that you want to render as a WMV file that you can save on your desktop.

The movie renderer takes a long time to work (about 5 times the length of a video's run time), and it's described as "experimental software" which means that you might run into some glitches. But right now, it's the only tool available that will let you save your edited videos.

You have until June 15th to download your assets and movies from the site.

Yahoo! has released a desktop email and personal information management client called Zimbra Desktop. It's based on the Zimbra email, calendar, and contact service that Yahoo! purchased a few years ago for $350 million. And that explains why the desktop client looks so much like the latest version of Yahoo!'s web based email service.

The interesting thing is that Zimbra Desktop doesn't just provide access to your Yahoo! email account. You can also link it to your Gmail, AOL, Windows Live, or other web mail accounts. It supports POP and IMAP as well. If you're using a tag-based email service like Gmail, Zimbra Desktop will import your labels and treat them like folders. But you can also use the email client to tag, sort, or search for messages on your desktop.

Zimbra is an open source application and it's available for Mac, Windows and Linux. Not only does it have an integrated calendar and contact solution, but it can also import your calendars and contact lists from Yahoo! and Gmail. Windows Live address books can also be imported, but not the calendar.

Personally, I haven't felt much need to use a desktop email client for the past few years. Web mail is accessible from any computer with a web browser, as well as mobile devices. And you don't need to configure any software to get it working. But if you're a fan of desktop email clients, you might want to give Zimbra Desktop a look. It's free, after all.

Yahoo! is slowly killing off some of its service that I kind of forgot it had. In January, the company announced it would be pulling the plug on Yahoo! Briefcase, an online file storage site that was state of the art 10 years ago when it offered 30MB of web based storage, but which hasn't really been updated since. Today Yahoo! is hammering the nail in the coffin of GeoCities, a web site building service that hasn't been updated in nearly as long.

Yahoo! has already stopped accepting new account registrations, but existing GeoCities pages won't be pulled down until later this year.

The company hasn't offered a simple path for migrating your data yet, but Yahoo! is suggesting users upgrades to paid Yahoo! web hosting accounts. There are no plans to offer a free web hosting service in the future.

[via Mashable]

Yahoo! has finally decided to pull the plug on Jumpcut, a web based video editor that has been on life support since December. That's when Yahoo! stopped letting users upload videos to the service, instead suggesting that they upload short videos to Flickr.

Now TechCrunch reports that Jumpcut is sending out emails to users letting them know that the service will be closed on June 15th, 2009.

It's too bad to see Jumpcut go down. The service could have been really useful. While it may seem strange to upload a video to the web before you've editied it, the truth is many of the free video editors for Windows and Linux computers either lack features or are too complicated for casual users. Jumpcut was simple to use, but offered a limited feature set. For instance, you couldn't download finished videos and you couldn't send them to YouTube, Yahoo! Video, or other sites. Rather, you had to direct viewers to Jumpcut or embed the Jumpcut video on your page.

Yahoo! will soon release a tool allowing existing users to download videos saved on the site -- something the company probably should have done ages ago.

Yahoo! launched a new version of Yahoo! Music this week. And its choc full of links to external services like Last.fm, Pandora, and YouTube. There are also links to other Yahoo! services like Flickr. Last year Yahoo! killed off its LaunchCast streaming radio service.

By linking out to sites that specialize in selling music downloads (including Amazon and iTunes), and sites that offer music videos (including YouTube), Yahoo! can focus on creating a one-stop shop for music without working out licensing deals with artists, which gets pretty expensive.

Yahoo! also plans to open its API to allow other msuic services to build applications that can be integrated with the Yahoo! Music web page.

[via Wired]

Yahoo! has unveiled a new interface for the company's image search engine. The centerpiece is a new image preview bar that opens up when you click on a new image. This preview area lets you continue browsing through thumbnails while viewing the image on its original web page. You can also conduct new searches without navigating back to the Yahoo! image search page.

When you conduct a search, Yahoo! will also now suggest related searches and let you filter images by size, color, and whether they come from Flickr or not.

[via Yahoo! Search Blog]

I might be the only writer at Download Squad who's excited about this, but baseball season is just around the corner. That means fantasy baseball leagues are drafting now. Like a lot of sports dorks, my fantasy site of choice is Yahoo. Although they've improved their web interface over the years -- by adding drag-and-drop roster editing, for example -- it's still not fun trying to manage your team from an iPhone. That's where a third-party app called Y!Fan comes in.

Y!Fan isn't pretty, but it (mostly) gets the job done. Although it's baseball season now, Y!Fan lets you manage your roster in other Yahoo sports, too. It doesn't support trades or add-drops yet, which is a big limitation, but it can save you some points if you're away from your computer and you need to put a pitcher in at the last minute. You can also use it to check player stats, and the all-important league standings. It's not perfect, but so far it's the only one out there.

Nearly a year ago, online image sharing site Flickr began allowing paid subscribers to upload videos up to 90 seconds in length. Today, Flickr expanded that program to the general public. In other words, both free and Pro members can now upload and share short videos using Flickr.

There are still some limitations. Free members can only upload 2 videos a month, and those videos can only be in standard definition. Starting today, Flickr Pro users, on the other hand, can upload high definition videos.

So if you've got a Flickr account and want to share short videos in addition to photos, Flickr's now an option for everyone. Or you could just use YouTube, Blip.tv, Vimeo, Viddler, or any of dozens of other online video sites that don't impost upload limits and time limits.

Yahoo! is rolling out a new tool that will make internet research using the company's search engine much easier. It's called Search Pad, and it allows you to copy search results to a sort of online scratch pad associated with your account. You can add text from web pages, organize your notes, and save different search profiles.

One interesting thing is that Search Pad will automatically try to detect when you're researching information on a particular topic. For example, if you do repeated searches for travel destinations, a note may pop up asking if you'd like to start taking notes for your vacation planning. You can also launch the application manually by clicking an icon on the side of your Yahoo! search page. Or you can disable Search Pad if you get tired of it.

Yahoo! is starting a phased rollout of Search Pad today. If you don't have access to the feature yet, you may have to wait a few days.

You can see a video demo of Search Pad in action after the jump.

Ten years ago when Yahoo! launched Yahoo! Briefcase, the service provided users with a much-needed place to store their files and documents online. But time marched on, and while other companies offer gigabytes of free storage space, Yahoo! still offers a paltry 30MB of free disc space.

Rather than upgrade the service with a slick new interface or additional storage, Yahoo! has decided to close its Briefcase. The company has posted a message alerting users that Yahoo! Briefcase will close on March 30th.

Yahoo! has posted an information page with instructions for downloading files from the service, but with only 30MB of storage available, I'm guessing most users (all two of them) won't have too many problems retrieving their data.

[via CNet]

Yahoo! appears to be slowly pulling the plug on Jumpcut, the company's web-based video editing application. When you go to upload videos, you now get a message saying that Jumpcut is no longer accepting uploads. Users will be able to continue remixing videos that they or other users have already uploaded for the foreseeable future, but no new videos can be added to the site.

Yahoo! recommends users who want to continue uploading and sharing videos use Flickr. But there are a few major differences between Jumpcut and Flickr. First, Flickr users don't get the advanced editing tools that Jumpcut offers. And second, you currently need to pay for a Flickr Pro account to upload videos. So what Yahoo! is really doing here is driving users to YouTube and other free web video services.

Jumpcut showed a lot of promise. I think there's a need for a service like this, which allows users to upload videos and then perform some basic cut and paste edits, alter the soundtrack, or add subtitles and other effects. Not everyone has or needs Windows Movie Maker or iMovie on their computers, making a web-based service appealing. But Jumpcut always offered a walled garden approach. Users could upload and edit videos. But they couldn't export them. While you could embed Jumpcut videos on any web site, you couldn't save the finished video to your desktop or export it to YouTube.

[via TechCrunch]

Yahoo! has been talking about plans to make its web-based email inbox smarter and more social by integrating other web services for months. Now the company is spelling out what that means a bit more clearly. VentureBeat reports the company held an event today where it showed off a demo of the next generation email inbox with a new sidebar with support for web applications like WordPress, Xoopit, and Flixter.

The new Yahoo! Mail will also feature Flickr integration, allowing users to share photos by logging into their Flickr accounts from their email inbox. Yahoo! Mail will also be able to mine your personal data to figure out who your closest contacts are. It will then be able to prioritize emails from those contacts.

Yahoo! will also be rolling out a new version of the Yahoo! Toolbar with access to your web applications and adding a new section to the My Yahoo! homepage where you can access the same apps. TechCrunch snagged an image of the new toolbar, which is scheduled for a beta release next week.

Update: And the official announcement is up on the Yahoo! Mail blog. Check out a video demo of the new Yahoo! Mail after the break.