Read All Your Email in One Place

Read All Your Email in One Place

With a little setup, you can read email from all of your accounts when you're on the go.

Most of us collect different email addresses like keys on a key ring: we keep adding them for different locations, such as home, work, or post office boxes, and eventually we've got so many keys we can't remember which key unlocks which door. In some situations, it'd be nice to have a single master key to unlock everything, and that's exactly what Yahoo! Mail can accomplish for your email addresses.

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A new window at Yahoo! Mail with prefilled text

If you've ever tried to check email while you're traveling, you know how frustrating it can be to check each of your email addresses with a foreign computer or in a place with limited access. While some email can wait until you're back in front of your computer, when you need to stay in touch it's important to have reliable access to your email from any computer with a web browser.

To get started, you'll need a Yahoo!ID [Hack #3] and an activated Yahoo! Mail account. You can get an ID and activate a Yahoo! Mail account at http://mail.yahoo.com. As soon as your account is set up, you can receive email at your Yahoo! address, and you can set up Yahoo! Mail to check your external email accounts as well.

Adding External Mail Accounts

The only requirement for adding an outside account to Yahoo! Mail is that it must be a publicly available Post Office Protocol(POP) account. Chances are very good that all of your email accounts use the POPv3 standard.

If you're using an Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) email account, you won't be able to check that account with Yahoo! Mail. Also, Yahoo! Mail does not support encrypted SSL connections for POP accounts, so if your mail server requires an SSL connection, you won't be able to check that account with Yahoo! Mail either.

Yahoo! Mail traffic is not encrypted and can be subject to eavesdropping. If your mail from external accounts is extremely sensitive, you might not want to view it via Yahoo! Mail.

To add an account, log in to Yahoo! Mail and click Mail Options from the upper-right side of the page. Click Mail Accounts to see a summary of your accounts and then click the Add button to start adding an external account.

From here, you just need to choose a name to represent the account, such as Work or School, and then enter the mail server information that tells Yahoo! Mail how to access that external account. The mail server address will depend on the company that provides your email service, and you'll need to contact them if you don't know the mail server address. You'll also need to include the same username and password you use to check that particular email account. This gives Yahoo! Mail enough information to check the account.

You'll need to choose a color to represent email from each external account. This will help you see at a glance the account each email is from as you view your Yahoo! Mail inbox.

Once your account is set up, you'll see a list of your external mail servers on the left side of the main mail page, as shown in Figure.

A list of external mail servers at Yahoo! Mail

You'll need to click on any external mail server you'd like to check, because Yahoo! Mail will not automatically check them. This means that if you're not ready to deal with a crisis at work while you're on a cruise ship, you can simply avoid clicking the link. After you've clicked the link, Yahoo! will contact your mail server and download any new email. The emails will appear in your inbox, and they'll be highlighted with the color that corresponds to that mail server.

Editing External Mail Accounts

You can access your external mail accounts settings at any time by clicking Mail Accounts from the Mail Options page. To change the settings, highlight an account and click the Edit button. You can modify the settings you entered when you set up the account: mail server, name, password, and account color. And you can also set any of the following additional options:

Deliver To

You can choose an existing Yahoo! Mail folder from the menu to have all external email sent to a folder other than your Inbox. Use this option if you want to keep external mail from mingling with mail sent to your Yahoo! Mail address.

Override Default POP Port

If your mail server uses a port other than 110 for POP delivery, you can set the alternate port here.

Leave Mail on POPServer

Check this option to leave a copy of the email on your mail server. With this option checked, Yahoo! will not delete email from your mail server, so you can retrieve it again later with your standard email client. This option is enabled by default.

Retrieve New Messages Only

With this option checked, Yahoo! Mail will download only new messages from your external account, not messages that have already been retrieved. This option is enabled by default.

Use Filters

Enabling this option will apply all of your existing Yahoo! Mail filters [Hack#52] to email from external accounts. You might want to disable this if you'd rather not filter incoming external mail. This option is also enabled by default.

Even though you might be receiving email from an external server, any replies to those messages will be from your Yahoo! Mail address. If you'd rather have your From: address be an external account, you'll need to upgrade to Yahoo! Mail Plus. At the time of this writing, a Plus account is $20 per year. You can read about all of the benefits of Yahoo! Plus at http://mailplus.yahoo.com.

Checking Mail on Your Phone

Another benefit of checking your external mail accounts with Yahoo! Mail is that you can read those messages via portable devices. Once the external accounts are set in Yahoo! Mail, you can use any Internet-enabled cell phone to read your mail. Point the phone's browser to http://mobile.yahoo.com, sign in, and choose the Mail link. From there, click Check Other Mail, as shown in Figure3-8.

You'll see a listing of all your external mail servers; click one to view messages from that account. If your current ISP doesn't offer mobile access to your email, the Yahoo! Mail external accounts feature is an easy way to enable it.

While you might not want to read all of your mail through Yahoo! all of the time, it's comforting to know that with a bit of setup, you can receive all of your email from all of your accounts on any computer with a web browser.

Checking non-Yahoo! email on a cell phone with Yahoo! Mobile