Importing and Exporting Yahoo! Mail with IMAP

This is a complicated process, but it does work. Here are the steps as outlined above in the video. It is strongly recommended that you do not perform this process on your primary operating system due to the fact the Thunderbird used here is an unstable build. Use a sandbox environment such as XP inside a VirtualBox, VMware session or similar. The web page mentioned in the beginning on the video: http://www.crasseux.com/linux/

1. Download the Thunderbird 3 installer from that page and install it. It must be from that page because that is the custom compiled version that will allow Yahoo! Mail access via IMAP. If that download link does not work, use this one instead.
2. Copy the files msvcp71.dll and msvcr71.dll to the C:\Program Files\Shredder directory. Download msvcp71.dll. Download msvcr71.dll.
3. Run Thunderbird/Shredder.
4. Tick Don’t import anything
5. Click Next
6. Click Cancel
7. Change Smart Folders view to All Folders
8. Click Tools
9. Click Account Settings
10. Click Account Actions
11. Click Add Mail Account
12. Input your name
13. Input your Yahoo! email address
14. Input your Yahoo! email account password
15. Click Continue
16. Click Edit
17. Change POP to IMAP
18. Change Username to your full Yahoo! email address
19. Change Incoming to imap.next.mail.yahoo.com
20. Change the port from 995 to 993
21. Click Manual Setup
22. Click OK
23. Expand the mail account on the left sidebar
24. Click Inbox
25. Click Confirm Security Exception
26. Click the mail account name on the sidebar at top left
27. Click Inbox

Follow along with the video to import/export mail from that point. Note: If you don’t get this right the first time, don’t worry. Try again, and it will eventually work. This is assuming that Yahoo! will allow IMAP access in this fashion, because at some point this will no longer work.

Notes

• You cannot be logged into the web-based Yahoo! Mail and the IMAP client at the same time. If you do, you will encounter errors.
• You may encounter errors when transferring mail to/from the Yahoo! account via IMAP. This is especially true if you’re transferring a large amount of email. It is suggested not to transfer more than 25 to 50 emails at a time.
• Yahoo’s IMAP access is slow. Don’t be surprised if mail takes a while to transfer to/from IMAP.
• This is not a reliable means of using Yahoo! Mail. You should only use this if you intend to transfer mail in or out of your Yahoo! Mail account to somewhere else.