Yahoo! pulls the plug on POP3 access?
According to a report 
on MacNN, Yahoo! has withdrawn POP3 access for external mail clients like Mail.app. Yahoo! webmail users will now only be able to use the service’s webmail interface.
The news item points to a Yahoo! Mail support statement that reads:
As a web-based email service, Yahoo! Mail does not currently offer access to POP or SMTP servers. This means that you will not be able to use an external email client such as Netscape Mail, Eudora, or Outlook to access your Yahoo! Mail account.
This seems to be a odds with other information (still?) on the Yahoo! Mail support site about POP3 access for Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts, and with my recollection that POP access has always been denied to users with free accounts.
Can anyone shed any more light on this?
UPDATE: Hmmm…. This may be a false alarm. Light shed in the comments suggests that no major change to existing restrictions has occurred. [Thanks, Ivan et al.]
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Tags: Apple Mail, external access, mail.app, POP, webmail, Yahoo
October 24th, 2006 at 12:32 pm
It looks to me as though MacNN is just wrong. That particular help page stating no POP3 support is in the mail help pages for Yahoo! Canada. It does not appear that Yahoo Mail Plus! is available for Yahoo Canada, hence no POP3 support. (However, that page flatly contradicts another Yahoo Canada help page which says POP3 is available if you sign up for Yahoo! Delivers, an ads-in-email based service I remember from years ago which I think Mail Plus! replaced.)
I use Mail Plus! for Yahoo, the POP access feature is still there, and there are tons of help pages about it on US Yahoo.
October 24th, 2006 at 12:40 pm
I also have Yahoo Mail Plus, and am having no problems with POP3 access. Regular free Yahoo Mail users have not had POP3 access for several years.
October 24th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
I have to disagree with Daniel. I have a regular (FREE) Yahoo email account and just sent and received several test messages via POP3 in Mail.app with no issues at all.
October 24th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
Huh. That seems very strange to me; all of their documentation, everywhere, says you need a Mail Plus! account, and I certainly had to get one. If you were able to use POP with a regular Yahoo! US mail account, that sounds like a fluke, or unsupported to say the least — it’s not what they claim is available.
On the other hand, the Yahoo Canada site still seemed to offer free POP3 if you get Yahoo! Delivers, which delievers commercial emails to you — this option was removed from US Yahoo years ago. Is yours a Yahoo US address (e.g. someone@yahoo.com)?
October 24th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
It’s actually a yahoo.co.uk address. Maybe that’s the difference.
October 24th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
I took a look at the yahoo.co.uk help pages, and it appears to be the same as Canada, and the US several years ago: free POP3 if you agree to Yahoo! Delivers (as in, deliveres advertising emails to your mailbox). Very interesting; I suppose that if one wanted free POP3 from Yahoo!, you could sign up for .ca or .co.uk instead of .com.
At any rate, I see no evidence that they’re planning on changing their POP3 access anywhere. (I wish they offered IMAP, however, though that’s a different discussion.)
October 24th, 2006 at 2:29 pm
I use macfreepop to pop yahoo email
works like a champ so far
October 24th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
I use freepop, but I was not able to let my yahoo account work with Apple Mail Version 2.1 (752/752.2) under Tiger 10.4.8. I used yahoo.com Lua
Version: 0.1.9d. Older verson don’t work either. I have to give repeately my yahoo account password, but I get an error back that my password has not been recognized.
Hotmail worked correctly after using the latest Lua hotmail.com Version: 0.1.6c. Somebody who can shine a light on this issue?
October 24th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
I get the same thing with Yahoo. I wonder if the Yahoo plugin in FreePOPs has been updated for the new Yahoo! Mail Beta interface yet?
October 24th, 2006 at 5:44 pm
Looking at this a bit more, the FreePOPs Support forum suggests that the yahoo module is broken at the moment. Russell (the developer) says that he is working on it
.
October 24th, 2006 at 9:10 pm
@ Ivan X
Yahoo! recently enabled IMAP but then shut it down.
October 25th, 2006 at 9:13 am
[...] Apple Mail users with webmail-based email accounts have a number of options for getting their emails into Mail.app. I had occasion to look at them again today, although mistakenly. [...]