Yahoo! Mail Plus features are now free to all

For years now, Yahoo! has been one of the remaining large email providers who required premium membership to use POP access for downloading your email.  If you don’t know what POP is, then, in short, it is a protocol that is used by mail clients (such as Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple OS X Mail.app and even the mail applications on mobile phones) to download email.  There are some other neat looking things they have added over the years that also required a premium membership.

Well it appears that that has all changed now.  I was looking into some issues I was having with a customer’s email on the Apple Mail application in OS X 10.6.8.  The problem ended up being that he had two step authentication enabled and I didn’t realize it.  But before this realization, I believed the problem to be that he was not on a Yahoo! Mail Plus account but instead just a free Yahoo! Mail account.  In doing research, I finally came across this page from Yahoo! explaining that all of the Yahoo! Mail Plus features are now available to all Yahoo! Mail users.  This includes POP/IMAP/SMTP access, disposable email addresses (useful when you need to sign up for something that you don’t want to have your real email address) up to 200 mail filters and 1TB (that’s Terabyte) of storage.  You can, however, pay for the Yahoo! Mail Ad-Free Service, which, in addition to removing all Ads from your mailbox, also prevents your account from ever expiring as the free accounts do after inactivity for a period of time.

While this is all well and great from Yahoo!, I still personally love, trust and recommend Gmail for personal email service and Office 365 for business email service.  But those are for another post.

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