In a recent update Yahoo! has removed some restrictions on the use of Yahoo! Mail through email clients. So now you can access your Yahoo! Mail inbox through an email client like Outlook or Thunderbird. Mozilla Thunderbird is an open-source email client for Windows and Linux from the same community that develops Mozilla Firefox. You can download a free copy of Mozilla Thunderbird from http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/. Thunderbird allows easy configuration with many email services including Yahoo! Mail. This article describes how you can configure your Yahoo! Mail account in Thunderbird.
- Open Thunderbird email client. Press Alt key once to show the menubar. From the menubar select Tools → Account Settings.
- In the Account Settings window, you would see all your already added email accounts. Near the bottom-left corner, you would see a button labeled Account Actions. Click on this button and select Add Mail Account to start the Mail Account Setup wizard.
- In the window that pops up, type in your full name, Yahoo! Mail email address and password. You can choose to save the password too so that you do not have to enter it everytime Mozilla Thunderbird starts. It saves your password in encrypted format. Then click on the Continue button.
- It would check the Mozilla ISP database to look for the known working settings for Yahoo! Mail service and present you with the results found. It gives you options to select either the IMAP or POP protocols. The POP protocol is pre-selected but you can also choose the IMAP protocol. The IMAP protocol is considered better as your email stays on the Yahoo! Mail server. If you use POP, your email is delivered to your email client and then deleted from the server. After this, there is only one thing left to do now – click on the Done button.
- Now you can check your Yahoo! Mail account emails in Thunderbird. To check the emails, select your Yahoo! Mail account on the left side list in Thunderbird and click on Read Messages in the right pane. Everytime you start Thunderbird, it will check for new messages on Yahoo!. If you let Thunderbird run, then it will keep checking for new messages every 10 minutes.