How To Access A Yahoo! Mail Account With IMAP

yahoo For a small while now there has been the ability to connect a Y! Mail account using IMAP, even for free accounts. As for why you can do it now and not before is because many mobile users prefer to access their mail via IMAP because it makes for easier synchronization, and also want the same ability on the desktop as well.

Now before continuing, in my examination of how well Y! Mail IMAP works, I consider it to be “fairly stable”. IMAP by nature is a complicated mail protocol, so don’t expect it to work nearly as well as when using Y! Mail in the browser.

With that being said, here are the server addresses and ports:

Incoming: imap.mail.yahoo.com, SSL, port 993
Outgoing: smtp.mail.yahoo.com, SSL, port 465

My recommendations for using Y! Mail this way

Purposely set your mail client to only check for mail every 10 minutes and no sooner. Any sooner than that and the mail check may fail, forcing you to restart the mail client.

Sending out large file attachments via IMAP is a bad idea, generally speaking. Stick to text-only messages for composing and replying and you’ll be fine.

Y! Mail, like most other webmail services, has a strict limit on how many messages you can send at any given time. If you rapid-fire send 10 messages in a row, yes the Y! Mail server will kick you off and make you wait anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours before you can send mail again.

Y! Mail employs the use of deferred delivery when you do anything on their mail servers they consider “not normal”. What this means is that it could very well happen that any message you send from a mail client using a Y! account won’t be delivered for 2 hours because the Y! mail servers aren’t “used to” you using a mail client yet. Eventually the deferred delivery will go away once you start using a mail client with a Y! Mail account regularly.

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