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! 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.

Affixa is a utility that can integrate your Gmail or Yahoo! Mail account with Windows.. First of all, once you install Affixa, you can set your webmail account as your default email service. That means when you use the "send" buttons in programs like Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, or Windows Explorer, Affixa can automatically open a browser window, create a blank message in Gmail or Yahoo! Mail and upload the files as attachments.

Affixa also supports "mailto" links. So when you click on an email link in any application, Affixa will populate a new webmail message with the correct address.

You can also right click on the Affixa icon in the Windows system tray to open an Affixa "basket" which lets you drag and drop files from your computer that you want to send as email attachments. If you're uploading pictures, Affixa will let you resize them before sending the email.

Another nifty feature is integrated drop.io support. If you're sending large files or a large number of files you can upload them to drop.io and Affixa will add a link to the drop point to your email instead of sending the items as file attachments.

Affixa is available as a free download. Or you can pay $3 a month year to get advanced features like support for multiple accounts or the ability to choose which browser you want to use, add signatures to your email messages, or zip files from the attachment basket.

You can check out a demo video of Affixa in action after the break.

[via Lifehacker]

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.

Does it frustrate you that even though you can add HTML links in the content of your email when creating it in Gmail, you can't add an HTML link to your signature? It sure frustrates me. Many webmail services have very limited signature editors, making it difficult to create a compelling signature.

If you would like to use more than just plain text in your signature for your webmail account, give WiseStamp a try. WiseStamp is a Firefox add-on that gives you a rich text editor to create your email signature, and gives handy links to instant messaging services or social networks that you can add in to personalize your signature further. WiseStamp supports Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, and Hotmail.

The email subject line. The bane of our existence. Back when Download Squad was just a wee little blog, we used to communicate the old fashioned way, by sending letters in the mail and waiting a week for them to arrive. It may not have been the most efficient way to keep in touch, but at least we didn't have to write subject lines.

Fortunately, Yahoo! has a hidden feature designed for the creativity-challenged. Can't come up with a clever or appropriate subject line for that email you're about to send? Just hit the subject button in the new version of Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! will throw in a quote, funny phrase, or who knows what?

Here are just a few of the things that we found. Keep in mind, somebody must have taken the time to actually type these in there.

• Do you use them for good, or for awesome?
• I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message.
• Hazards of storing plutonium in Tupperware
• Why does Chinese food always taste better in front of a computer?
• Fwd: Re: FW[2]: RE: re: [FWD] joke

[via Lifehacker and WebWare]

There are plenty of ways to get a custom email address. You can sign up for service with Mail.com and choose from a number of custom domains. Or you can register a domain and use Google Apps to link it with an email account for free. But if you're a Yahoo! Mail fan, you might find that getting the domain name you want isn't the hard part. It's getting the prefix.

About 266 million people use Yahoo! Mail, which means the odds of getting an address like john@yahoo.com are pretty poor at this point. Today Yahoo! made things a bit easier by opening up two new domains, @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com.

If RocketMail sounds familiar, that's because it's the name of a company that Yahoo! purchased in 1997. The first version of Yahoo! Mail was built on technology developed by RocketMail earlier in the 1990s. You can snag an account using one of the new domains by visiting the new signup page.

It's been a while since we've seen a compelling new browser start page. There was a real flurry of start pages a year or two ago when the likes of Google Personalized Start Page (now iGoogle), NetVibes, Pageflakes, and a myriad of other copycat sites launched. Strangely, even with such an amazing variety of start pages to choose from, we've never found any of them to be particularly compelling.

Then we were introduced to Feedly. Feedly is a start page that only works in Firefox, because it requires a Firefox browser extension to run. It's actually a locally hosted page that goes out and grabs information feed reader sites and social networks that you use, and presents it to you in a friendly magazine style layout.

Feedly can go through your Firefox bookmarks, as well as your My Yahoo! page, NetVibes, Bloglines, Twitter, FriendFeed, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail accounts to find relevant information to present to you. If we can offer one tip, it would be to choose carefully. When setting up our page, we checked every possible option, and ended up with far too many feeds, and too many feeds that we had lost interest in that were still in some account somewhere that Feedly found.

Feedly also has a very tight integration with Google Reader, and anything that you read in Feedly will be marked as read in Google Reader, and vice versa. This is cool, but it's also dangerous, since and feeds that you add to Feedly (or that it finds) are automatically added to your Google Reader account. So again, choose carefully what feeds you want to be seeing in Feedly, as they will affect your Google Reader account.

But once it's all set up, Feedly is a very useful and elegantly done start page - so much so, that we haven't been compelled to remove it. And since no other start page has captured our interest, that's certainly something.

Yahoo! has added the ability to view photos in email messages as slideshows without downloading them first. Honestly, we're not entirely certain when this feature was added, but it was brought to our attention by a reader comment. When we looked into it, we found that at least five months ago, there was no photo slideshow feature. And now there is. So we're going to call it a new feature.

In order to view attached images as a slideshow, you'll need to switch to the Yahoo! Mail beta interface. This feature is not available in Yahoo! Mail classic. When you receive an email with attached images, you should see an option to show images. Once you click the button, you should see several thumbnails at the bottom of your message, and the option to view those images as a slideshow.

Thanks Sandeep!

Hot on the heels of Google announcing their integration of the Postini security solutions into Gmail through their acquisition, Yahoo! lets us know that they are upgrading their Spam filters.

Yahoo! Mail will be releasing a new security upgrade to their email system that is said to block spam, particularly all that junk you might be getting for eBay and PayPal scams. They call the new technology 'DomainKeys', and it will block all phishing, spam and fraudulent emails that might try and sneak in to your inbox. This will all be achieved by verifying the domain of the sender. Sounds like such a simple solution, but we are sure it's more complex under the hood.

The new security updates should be fully rolled out in a few weeks. Also, users should all have been upgraded to include the new mail to sms feature.