A long long time ago in an Internet far far away, Yahoo used to allow (for free) POP3 access to the emails in your account. In those days when GMail did not exists, it used to be one of the best choices out there. After that, a critical period came when I was at a loss with the personal email choice. I was very keen on having local copies of the emails (storage was an issue). Years passed, improvised solutions such as YPops that would act as an email server (POP3 and SMTP) could be set up on the client machine that would parse the Yahoo Mail HTML site and would then present the emails via POP3 to any client seemed decent solutions. Still, this was not a straightforward solution …

When the GMail era started, I stopped using Yahoo Mail for good and switched to my Google account only. Today, a little bit late for my taste, I came across the free Zimbra Desktop by Yahoo!. It is an email client for Yahoo mail accounts, GMail account as well as any other POP3/IMAP mail servers. Part of the larger Yahoo! Zimbra Collaboration Suite (a Exchange/Outlook wannabe).

I have tried it out – but it seems a little bit sluggish, although it also incorporates Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, etc. besides Mail. Tried it out of curiosity, but I think I’ll still stick to Outlook and GMail via the Web Interface (lately storage in the cloud with high availability is no longer an issue … so I don’t feel the need to have local copies of my email anymore).

Anyway – congrats Yahoo! for reopening (up to a point) your email for free.