Direct Support for Yahoo IMAP

[Bijan Soleymani]

You can access Yahoo mail directly by IMAP rather than through
Webmail. You need a special version of thunderbird:
http://www.crasseux.com/linux/thunderbird-2.0.0.22.en-US.win32.installer.exe

http://www.crasseux.com/linux/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Mail#Free_IMAP_and_SMTPs_access

incoming server: imap.mail.yahoo.com (IMAP port 143)
outgoing server: smtp.mail.yahoo.com (SMTP SSL port 465)
username: user...@yahoo.com
password: same as yahoo webmai

you can also use IMAPs (IMAP with SSL)
incoming server: imap.next.mail.yahoo.com (IMAP enable SSL port 993)l
certificate does not match hostname so you have to accept manually

[Andrew]

Great! Does your modified Thunderbird work by making the Yahoo IMAP
servers
think it's the Zimbra Desktop client?

It would be nice if it wasn't necessary to download a modified version
of Thunderbird, either by getting this incorporated into the regular
Thunderbird source (which I'd guess is very unlikely) or putting the
functionality into an extension, which from what other people have
said might require implementing an IMAP proxy and could be a lot more
work.

[Emma Burge]

please unsubscribe me


> Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 01:30:25 -0700
> Subject: Re: Direct Support for Yahoo IMAP
> From: ale...@gmail.com
> To: thunderbird-we...@googlegroups.com

[Chris Clifton]

Emma,
At the bottom of every mail you should find this message;
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Thunderbird Webmail Extension" group.
> To post to this group, send email to
thunderbird-we...@googlegroups.com
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
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> For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/thunderbird-webmail-extension?hl=en

--

[Bond_jjs]

Has anyone tried this yet? i read that imap is not secure or something
like not as secure as POP. So what's the diff between POP and IMAP?

[Bijan Soleymani]

There is support for using IMAPs (IMAP over SSL), the server for this
is imap.next.mail.yahoo.com. This should be secure. IMAP is similar in
security to POP. If you use unencrypted IMAP it is as unsafe as
unencrypted POP. If you use encrypted IMAP (over SSL) it is as secure
as encrypted POP (over SSL).

The difference between IMAP and POP is that with IMAP you can have
several folders on the server and can store your messages on the
server to access them from multiple computer/programs. Of course you
can also download all your messages locally with IMAP, and use it
exactly like POP if you want as well.

[Bijan Soleymani]

Hi Andrew,

It works by sending a single command: ID ("GUID" "1"), and then the
rest of the IMAP commands are the same as for any other server. The
Zimbra Desktop client also supports some fancy authentication scheme,
but this is unnecessary as you can just use encrypted password login
over SSL, and that should be about as secure.

I really do want to write an extension for this. I don't think it is
possible to send random IMAP commands from an extension, so it would
probably involve writing a proxy. In turn to support SSL would require
openssl on the client computer. This is generally not a problem on
linux, but it would be an extra download on windows.

On the other hand since this is only a few lines of code, I will see
if it can be included into the regular Thunderbird source, but it is
doubtful.

Bijan

[Morac]

The only problem I've found using your Thunderbird to access IMAP4, is
that Yahoo periodically rejects the login information even though it's
correct (logging shows an authentication error). This forces me to
repeatedly login over and over again nearly every time Thunderbird
checks for mail. I have Thunderbird remember the password, but when
the prompt comes up the remember password box is unchecked by default
so I have to check it and then click okay each time the prompt comes
up (which is often).

Finally because of a bug in Thunderbird 2.0.0.x, the password prompt
will appear more often then it should when checking for new mail in
multiple folders. This should be fixed in Thunderbird 3.0b4 (which is
a lot better than TB 2.0), but that doesn't help since the compiled
version offered is TB 2.0.0.22.