Mail.app users with Hotmail or Yahoo Mail accounts have long had to use third-party plugins to get hold of their emails.

MacFreePOPs is one such utility that is already Lion-compatible and supports an astonishing range of web-based mail servers, offering POP-like access to your accounts.

Another plugin, mBox Mail , is just for Hotmail users and claims to offer a more “IMAP-like” experience.

It allows mail.app (or any other IMAP-enabled mail client like Thunderbird or Entourage/Outlook) to access Hotmail messages and folders, syncs trash between your mail client and the server and also syncs up drafts, sent mail and message flags.

A patch to make the app Lion-friendly has just been released.

Unlike MacFreePOPs which is donation-ware, an mBox Mail licence costs USD 19.99, although a 30 day free trial is available to try it out first.

I ought to confess that (contrary to my usual commitment) I haven’t tested this out first to see how well it works.

UPDATE: Not quite as bad as it sounds — See later post.

In April Microsoft announced that it would be terminating WebDAV access to its Hotmail accounts at the end of June this year and replacing it with a proprietary service of Microsoft’s own creation (DeltaSync).

This is bad news for Mail.app users with Hotmail accounts, who have been using utilities like HTTPMail and MacFreePOPs to access their email. After 30 June, they won’t work. (There are reports that 10.5.3 has broken HTTPMail for some users, merely hastening the inevitable).

For those unwilling to let go their Hotmail email address, another solution beckons. While the plugins might not work any more, a web-based service is offering the same function.

IzyMail , so it claims, “enables you to access webmail from major providers such as AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, Windows Live, Fastmail or Gmail with any eMail application”. It even has a special page on setting up Hotmail on the iPhone.

It provides users with incoming and outcoming servers that can be plugged into Mail.app’s Accounts preferences. IzyMail does the heavy-lifting behind the scenes, and delivers fresh Hotmail into your Inbox via POP.

It offers free accounts (with some limitations) and a paid option (c. USD 18/year):

Or perhaps it’s time to take another look at Gmail. microsoft, hotmail, httpmail, macfreepops, wevdav, webmail, izymail, mail.app, apple mail, gmail, fastmail, yahoo, aol, desperate measures

MacFreePOPs, a plugin that allows Mail.app users to access email from web-based services like Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL (and many, many more) has been updated.

It’s now compatible with Leopard, and includes a fully universal version (0.2.5) of the FreePOPS engine.

Running the app launches a freepopsd server which translates local POP3 requests into HTTP actions that web-based services can understand, “fooling” webmail interfaces into coughing up your email for Mail.app.

It supports an astonishing range of webmail services, including Hotmail, Lycos, SqirrelMail, Yahoo, mailcom and several hundred that I have never heard of.

MacFreePOPs is donation-ware and is available from the developer’s web site .hotmail, mail.app, apple mail, yahoo, lycos, mailcom, webmail, leopard mail, plugins

MacFreePOPs is one of two utilities that allow Mail.app users to access email from web-based services like Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and more.

MacFreePOPs 2.0, just released, adds two nice new features of the mix.

It now includes an auto-updater, which means that users no longer need to go through the hassle of manually updating the separate plugins for each individual web service. It also checks for updates to the main MacFreePOPs application and the underlying freepopsd engine which powers the plugins:

It is now also “half-universal”. That is to say, parts of the app are now compiled as universal binaries, although the main app is still needs Rosetta to run on Intel Macs. The developer is appealing for donations from happy users to cover the USD 500 cost of new software needed to update the whole app. There is more on this in the app’s readme file.

A new reset/uninstall command is also included.

This update narrows the gap between MacFreePOPs (donation-ware, more complicated) and MailForward (shareware, easier to use).

[Thanks, Gary!]mail.app, apple mail, webmail, hotmail, yahoo, aol, squirrelmail, gmail, plugins, email

Webmailer is a System Preferences pane that offers a quick and easy way to set a variety of webmail clients as the default handler for composing new messages from mailto: links.

Gmail users already have options to achieve this, but this new utility makes the same feature available for users of a range of web-based services including .Mac, SquirrelMail, AOL, Hotmail, Horde, Roundcube and Yahoo!

After installing the preference pane, all you have to do is select webmailer as the default client and then select one of the preset webmail services:

The readme contains detailed instruction on how to create customised links for other webmail services.

The developer created Webmailer to ease a terrible affliction:

Ever click on a mailto: link, only to scream in frustration as Apple Mail opens yet again? The curse of the webmail user is that there is no way to get around this problem. That is, until now.

Webmailer comes in a Tiger and a Panther version due to the different ways in which default emailers are handed by the two systems.

Get the right one for you from the developer’s web site .

UPDATE: Works with Joyent too! See the comments.mail.app, apple mail, plugins, system preference, webmail, gmail, dotmac, .mac, yahoo, horde, squirrelmail, hotmail, email, mailto:

The poster at The Spam Chronicles is looking at how various programs and services handle (or don’t handle) spam.

First off, he compares Mail and Thunderbird by testing how well they process 109 spam emails released from his Gmail account.

The junk controls on both clients were reset at the start of the test.

He discovered that Mail flagged 42 of them as spam and missed 67 for a 39% success rate. Thunderbird faired better: it flagged all 109 as spam when its junk mail controls were run on the Inbox.

He them tried again with 61 spam emails from his Yahoo account and found that Mail.app “flagged 23 as spam while delivering 17 to the inbox for a 56% success rate” while Thunderbird again flagged them all when its filter was run on the Inbox.

He concludes:

Apple Mail starts with a more conservative approach in order to avoid falsely flagging e-mail as spam. In Apple Mail the spam filter is on my default. Thunderbird starts off with an aggressive filter but the spam filter is off by default and must be enabled.

Of course, this is not a neutral statistical sample sound for all eternity, nor is it fair to judge the clients on untrained filters, but the result is still interesting.

In another post he compares how a wider variety of web-based and Desktop email clients handled a week of spam, covering Yahoo!, .Mac’s webmail, Gmail, AOL, Apple Mail, Thunderbird and more.

There he finds out that on “the first day Apple Mail caught 10 and missed 10 junk mails. After that initial training it improved dramatically catching 6 and missing 1.”

For .Mac, he makes a perceptive observation: “.Mac mail does not have any web based spam filter, at least not visible to the user”. Nonetheless, “typically, only 1/2 the junk email appeared in my mailbox”.mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, email, spam, junk, gmail, aol, yahoo, dotmac, .Mac

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.

Frequent changes in log in procedures due to the current rapid interface development in some services breaks them from time to time.

As far as I can tell, this is the current state of play.

The easiest to use, Mail Forward, is working fine. It has just been updated (3.2.2) to accommodate Windows Live Mail beta service changes and tell you more exactly why it can’t work with Yahoo! Mail Beta accounts. It works as a a “webmail translator” that forwards your AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, MSN, and Yahoo webmail transparently into Mail.app. (I know that there are more directly ways to get your Gmail and AOL email, but this app offers to do it too).

It retrieved emails from my Yahoo! (set not to use the beta) and Hotmail test accounts today without any problems. It works, it’s easy to set up but it’s shareware (19.95 USD)

MacFreePOPs is a GUI front-end for the open source FreePOPs project. It free, works with a wider variety of services and is harder to set up.

Even with the latest version (1.6) and the latest modules for Yahoo! and Hotmail, I couldn’t get it to work for me today. A quick glance at the support forum , reveals that lots of Hotmail and Yahoo! users are having problems at the moment. The developer is working on fixes for both.

HTTPMail is a specific plugin for older Hotmail and MSN accounts. Newer accounts need to be upgraded to Hotmail Plus in order for the plugin to work. I can’t test this. It’s freeware and comes in Jaguar, Panther, Tiger and Universal Binary flavours.

Have I missed any?mail.app, apple mail, webmail, hotmail, yahoo, msn, plugins, tips