Problems getting Yahoo! Mail through Apple Mail. Here are three free alternatives

I recently got an e-mail from a fellow MacValleyite complaining that Apple Mail would not receive Yahoo! Mail any more. They use Snow Leopard 10.6.8. 

I then checked my own Apple Mail running under 10.11.2. I found that Apple Mail had stopped receiving Yahoo! Mail early in January. I could find nothing to fix the problem. So I knew I needed an alternative to access Yahoo! Mail.

I need Yahoo! Mail because I have ATT U-Verse and Wireless service. ATT has contracted with Yahoo to use their e-mail as ATT’s e-mail. That’s how I get my notification each month that my U-Verse bill is ready to be paid. 

I can’t ditch Yahoo! Mail without switching Internet Providers. That’s a hassle for the future.

So, what alternatives did I find to Apple Mail for receiving Yahoo! Mail. I found three of them.

 

The first was to use Yahoo!’s Web client. I just used Safari to log into Yahoo.com and Yahoo! Mail came right up. 

The second was to download and install Mozilla’s Thunderbird e-mail client.  Thunderbird has the advantage of working with both IMAP and POP3 e-mail providers. It has many add-ins. The only criticism I’ve read about concerns its esthetic appearance. It still looks the same as it did 10 years ago. 

If you want an e-mail client with an up to date appearance, may I suggest Nylas N1?  It is advertised as an “extensible, open source mail client”. If you want to try the latest e-mail client, this is it. 

Right now, it’s free. It’s easy to set up your e-mail accounts. It only supports IMAP from what I could tell. Right now the developers want to encourage as many other developers as possible to make plug-ins for this app. It is NOT compatible with the Thunderbird plug-ins, though. 

 

That’s my off the cuff suggestions for getting Yahoo! Mail if Apple Mail has stopped working on this account for you. 

 

Tom Briant

Editor, MacValley Blog