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.]mail.app, apple mail, yahoo, webmail, POP, external accessSimilar Posts:

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• The Death of Hotmail for Mail.app users and a new solution
• MacFreePOPs 2.3: Webmail plugin gets leopardised
• Mail Forward 3.1.1.b1: Reading your webmail in Mail.app

The external access is secured with a self-signed SSL certificate. Unless you import the certificate into your Keychain you get endless annoying error messages. And importing it wasn’t as easy as you might expect.

In the end, I offered to write up a walk-through for other Mac users in the College, and I’m posting it here too. It’s all documented in Apple Mail‘s help file under “I’m getting a certificate-related error message” but visual learners will appreciate the pictures.

How to accept a self-signed SSL certificate in Mail.app permanently (with screenshots) after the jump.

When you try to connect to an IMAP server that uses a self-signed SSL certificate for the first time in Apple Mail, you will get the following alert message:

Don’t click “Continue”. Click on the “Show Certificate” button. You will see the following dialog box:

Click on the picture of the certificate and drag it to your Desktop.

Double click on the file ending with the extension “cer” on your Desktop. An application called Keychain Access will then open and you will see the following dialog box:

Click on the Keychain drop-down menu and the following options will appear:

Select “X509Anchors” and then “OK”. You will be asked to type in the Administrator password for your Mac. Do that, then you’re done! The certificate is now permanently stored in your Keychain.

You can then return to the very first “Unable to Connect” dialog box and click on “Continue”.

You will now be able to access the IMAP server without constant error messages.Similar Posts:

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• Long delays with Mail.app replies
• Encryption tutorial for Mail.app