Patrick said:
I do not have a paid acct with Yahoo, but thought that with Ypops one could
use Outlook with a free Yahoo acct. In the tutuorial I followed, it
instructed me to use 127.0.0.1 as both my outgoing and incoming mail server.
Oh, and *now* you mention using YahooPOPs. You didn't think that was
critical information to include in your original post?
Yes, you do configure your e-mail client to use localhost or 127.0.0.1
for the mail hosts. That's because Ypops is running on your local host
as a POP-to-HTTP proxy. You connect your POP client to Ypops and it
connects to Yahoo Mail using HTTP to screen- and URL-scrape to navigate
their web site (which means when they change their web pages or the
navigation routes that Ypops will stop working until the author gets
around to fixing his proxy).
So WHICH user interface did you select in the webmail interface to Yahoo
Mail? Whichever one you select is the same one you have to select in
Ypops. It scrapes the screen and also uses URLs to navigate around the
Yahoo Mail web site. Unless you match Ypops to use the same set of
screens as the ones for the UI that you selected for your Yahoo webmail
account, Ypops won't be able to find its way around. Anytime Yahoo
changes their webmail screens, Ypops, FreePOPs, PopPeeper, Thunderbird's
Webmail plug-in, and other similar screen-scraper navigational tools
will all fail and you wait until its author gets around to changing
their code.
Yahoo Mail will also periodically intervene the login process by
injecting a security web page that requires you to enter the characters
shown in a CAPTCHA image. This checks that a human is using the
account, not a bot. Ypops can't handle the image. It's an image, not
actual characters. You see the characters in the image but they aren't
text characters that a program can capture. Ypops will popup an alert
telling you about the CAPTCHA security page that is interfering with the
login and presents you the opportunity to enter the characters to
complete the login. It doesn't work. Why? When they submit the
characters that you enter, a new Yahoo Mail session gets started so the
CAPTCHA image changes and what you entered for the old image doesn't
match up with the characters in the new image. You will have to use the
webmail interface to your Yahoo Mail account to do the login, see the
CAPTCHA security page, enter the characters, and complete the login.
Then you should be okay for a couple of months before the CAPTCHA
security page shows up again in the login process.
I used Ypops for maybe 5 years. I eventually gave up on it because: (1)
Yahoo Mail wasn't a primary e-mail account so any time wasted getting
mail polls to work with it were a waste of time; and, (2) Ypops goes
unresponsive at least twice per week which mean you won't get any new
e-mails through your Yahoo Mail account, you don't see any error popups
about Ypops not working, and you'll have to realize that Ypops stopped
working and have to unload and reload it. It isn't super-reliable. It
is sensitive to changes in Yahoo Mail's web pages.
If you want to send e-mails out through Yahoo Mail using Ypops, you'll
have to also enable the SMTP server in Ypops and the port you select on
which it listens will have to match what you specify in the e-mail
account defined in your POP client. Why do you want to send e-mails out
through Yahoo Mail? For *free* accounts, Yahoo will append their spammy
promotional signature onto the end of every e-mail you send out using
their webmail service. That means every one of your outbound e-mails
sent through a free Yahoo account are spammified. You think that looks
professional? Just because you receive e-mails via Yahoo Mail doesn't
mean you also have to send e-mails out through Yahoo Mail. Instead
configure the e-mail account in your client to receive via Ypops (and
from Yahoo Mail) but send out through your ISP's SMTP mail host. Then
when you send new e-mails using that account in your client, they
originate from your ISP's mail host and with no spam attached to it.
Whatever you put in the E-Mail field in the account defined in your
client is the e-mail address that your recipient's will see, so although
you send through your ISP's SMTP mail host, your recipients will see
your Yahoo Mail address and send their e-mails there.
I use the classic UI for Yahoo Mail's webmail interface (the newer
Ajax-enabled UI is slower). You have to make sure Ypops is configured
to use the same webmail UI screens so it knows how to navigate the
webmail pages. If Yahoo Mail recently changed the content of their
webmail pages, it could be that you just tried to start using Ypops but
now have to wait until its author gets around to updating Ypops to match
those webmail page changes. And it could be that Ypops simply became
unresponsive so you'll have to unload and reload it (or reboot which
does the same thing since it is a Startup folder item). If you
downloaded the beta version, try using the older non-beta version.
Don't expect reliable e-mailing when using Ypops, or when using any
screen-scraper type of utility to navigate a webmail site.
