This is not exactly a review of Yahoo!. Instead I am trying to bring back sanity to the Net in my own little way. (atleast helping spread the word:)
After the Dotcom hype when Yahoo’s stocks soared, came the crash. Internet isn’t what it used to be: full of free lunches and goodies for picking. Banners don’t bring revenue anymore, thanks to those filters that stop them bothering you. (God bless filters)
Yahoo has gone the way of all those websites who have started to charge for services we had taken for granted all along. Can’t blame them though. But not to despair - help is at hand.
If you had a Yahoo! account and used it for checking your mail through your favourite POP3 Mail-client, you are desperate now. (Yahoo! Mail ditched free access to POP3 protocol and decided to lean on your credit card for a ’moderate’ charge)
You might migrate to other free POP3 and IMAP providers like Myrealbox, etc and broadcast your new e-mail to all near and far.
Or you’ve convinced yourself to go through: Open Browser, type ’mail.yahoo.com’, username, password, login, inbox, checklist the spam, delete spam, save mails from buddy to disk, click reply, write mail when all the while burning the hourly oil online, empty trash, logout. close browser. Ooof, I can’t stand that many clicks, typing and the browser!
To the rescue, comes YahooPOPs! (https://yahoopops.sourceforge.net/)
An angel of a program, YahooPOPs is [in the words of its creators]: an open-source initiative to provide free POP3 access to your Yahoo! Mail account. (OpenSource!! I simply cant stop smiling whenever I read those preamble words..’The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License...’ )
This application emulates a POP3 server and enables popular email clients like Outlook, Netscape, Eudora, Mozilla, Calypso, etc., to download email from Yahoo! accounts.
So now, instead of all those clicks, just start your mail client, alongside YahooPOPs, and go the usual smooth way to connect to your mailbox on Yahoo! Mail, download the mails and read, write at ease.
The only thing that you might need is to send your mails not through yahoo, but through your ISP’s SMTP servers. (not a bother anyway)
The program is tiny in size and doesn’t gobble up your precious processor or memory resources. It stays out of your way in the system tray. Once you have filled in the details of your yahoo mail account, you can even forget about its presence!
If you are suffering from chronic Spam in your mailbox, try Mailwasher (https://mailwasher.net/). It is a well thought out program that can check multiple mailboxes, download the headers and display them for you. It will mark out the spam mail and rebounce them back to the senders as if your account doesn’t exist. If the spammers are using standard mailinglist programs, chances are that your mail address might be deleted from those mailinglists saving you from further mailings.
The advantages of mailwasher are numerous.
Firstly, it lets you peep into the contents of your mailbox without having to launch your full fledged mailclient like Outlook, etc. You can also preview the mails before downloading them to your mail client.
For mails from trusted sources, you can add to the friends list in Mailwasher and it will remember not to bounce them back by accident. All other trash spams that promise you a million bucks from Nigeria or pills to enlarge your ’member’, etc etc will be bounced and blocked henceforth from crowding your mailbox - End of spam.
Not to mention, the interface of Mailwasher is neat (except for the irritating flashy banner-box of self-advertisement) and it loads in microseconds, negotiates with your mail server faster than you can say Yahoo!, and get the job done without hassles. (Three mouse clicks!)
So, what am trying to get across to you are two indispensible tools, one absolutely necessary for those who have been accessing their Yahoo! Mailboxes through POP3 access and the other for all the other POP3 folk in general who need to, from time to time, weed out the spam from their boxes and lives.
Once you get them, you will wonder how you have ever managed without them in the first place!
Cheers,
Laxmi.