Wow, so I just discovered this open source tool called YPOPs! that magically gives you POP3 access to Yahoo! Mail. How does it do it? From the web site:
YPOPs! is an application which emulates a POP3/SMTP mail server and provides free POP3 and SMTP access to Yahoo! Mail. It does not depend on Yahoo's POP3/SMTP mail server. You can use a mail client of your choice!I only stumbled across this tool because I was trolling through my old Yahoo! Mail account and noticed that I had some things in there worth preserving (i.e., moving to my Gmail account), so I decided to give it a try.
Long story short? Piece of cake. I took all my mail and transferred it over to my Gmail account. Even my sent mail, which at first seemed impossible because the program doesn't offer to download mail from your sent folder. However, simply by creating a user-defined folder called "MySentMail" and then moving all messages from the Sent folder into your MySentMail folder, you can then add that MySentMail folder to the download list within YPOPs! and then transfer it over to Gmail.
A big thank you to the developers of this useful little tool:
- Brian Gunlogson: UIDL patch, bug fixes
- Leif Jensen: UIDL patch, bug fixes
- Yogesh Khatri: Patches, bug fixes and new features
- Ssergey: For the translation of the help file to Russian
- Last but not the least, all the people who have provided their inputs for the help file.
5 comments:
Why do you promote spamming sites?
YPOP first plays music and then redirects to some strang site.
Get a life and don't sucker people.
Dear Anonymous (and others):
Thank you very much for pointing out that the original site I linked to (www.ypopsemail.com) seems to be redirecting to other seemingly random sites. At the time I wrote this article, and still to this day, I visited the site using Firefox with a preemptive javascript blocking add-on called NoScript, which is why I was not affected by the audio and the subsequent redirect. So as a side note, I'd advise you to give Firefox a try if you haven't already, and install the NoScript add-on to protect yourself.
That said, I have removed that link and linked to a much more reputable source (sourceforge.net) for the file you'll need.
Again, thank you and I sincerely apologize I led you astray. Had I been affected by the embedded audio and the URL redirect at the time I wrote the post, I would have never posted a link to that site.
Sincerely,
Mike
Did you have multiple folders in your Yahoo mail account?
Does YPOPS handle that?
I know that GMail uses Labels instead of Folders and am wondering if YPOPS magically takes care of all that for you i.e. migrates from Yahoo's folder structure to GMail Labels structure?
Thanks
peaceoneart1: well, it's not quite automatically migrated--there is a little work to be done on your end. For example, I set up YPOPs on my computer and downloaded all my mail into Outlook (any email program will suffice, as long as it supports the IMAP protocol). Once I had all my mail downloaded from Yahoo, I then set up my mail client to make an IMAP connection with Gmail. So now, my mail client has two accounts: Yahoo's downloaded mail, and Gmail's IMAP connection, which is synchronized with the Gmail server.
That is the key part: synchronized with the Gmail server. Because I set up my Gmail account using the IMAP protocol (as opposed to POP), any changes I make in my mail client are mirrored on Gmail's servers. Thus, I simply took the first folder from my Yahoo account (a folder called Family, for example) and drug that down into my Gmail account. Instantly, the mail client started to copy the messages from Yahoo over to Gmail.
Do this for each folder you have, and in Gmail you'll have a label for each folder. See, your mail client presents "folders" to you, while Gmail presents them as "labels." There's lots of help in Gmail explaining how it works but it's literally as easy as switching over to your mail client and dragging a folder of messages from your Yahoo account into your IMAPped Gmail account.
In Yahoo, you'd see a Family folder with 5 emails in it. In Gmail, you'd see a Label called Family, with 5 emails having the Family label. The reason Gmail's so cool is that you can have multiple labels (i.e., tags) for each email. For instance, I might have an email from my fiance about our wedding. In Yahoo, I either drag that to my Family folder, or my Wedding folder. In Gmail, I simply label it as both Family and Wedding. Now if I click on the Family label, that email appears. Same as if I were to click the Wedding label--the email would be there, too. It's not a duplicate copy, it's just one email with many different labels on it.
Hope that helps. Sorry for the long-windedness!
Thanks! That would do the trick. Perhaps more efficient than what I describe below (also long!).
Also discovered the Zimbra Desktop client, from Yahoo, which essentially does the same thing as you describe.
You install it, configure it for both your Yahoo and GMail accounts. Then sync with Yahoo to download all the email in all folders (and Contacts and Categories as well). Next step is to export all the Yahoo mail into a TGZ file (proprietary format) and then import this into your GMail account on the Zimbra Desktop Client and let IMAP works its magic.
The Zimbra Desktop Client (in Beta now) is sorta slow and sluggish and is a real RAM hog (165k) so wouldn't use if for much other than what is described above.
As you say Labels definitely have their advantage over Folders, especially given the extensive Search capabilities of GMail.
Cheers
Post a Comment