This integration allows Yahoo Mail users to bypass the original 25MB file size limit, and easily send large files such as photos and videos. Of course, users can also send typical files such as documents, etc. As another plus, the combined service lets users access their Dropbox files from Yahoo Mail, or files uploaded via Yahoo Mail from Dropbox.

Dropbox integration is now available through the browser version of Yahoo Mail in English, French, Spanish, German and Italian. Users who do not already have a Dropbox account can now create one through Yahoo Mail.

By all appearances, Dropbox will operate seamlessly while inside Yahoo Mail, making for an integration very similar to the Gmail/Google Drive one offered by Google. For more information on creating a Dropbox account through Yahoo, visit the Yahoo Mail Blog.

This partnership is expected to provide many solutions to Yahoo Mail users, and Dropbox being as popular as it is, could really make a change for the struggling mail service.

Does this new feature change your opinion on Yahoo Mail? Will you consider switching?

Sources: Yahoo, Dropbox

The post Yahoo Mail Adds Dropbox Attachment Support For All Users [Updates] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Free Email Providers

So I’ve gathered up a list of ten popular free email providers that you might want to take for a spin if Gmail or Yahoo are not your thing.

Hotmail

Hotmail is Microsoft’s email service, and I have to say this is one of the best email providers on this list (if not the very best). We’ve recently held a poll asking if you guys would be willing to switch to Hotmail, and most of you picked the answer that went “I will never ever consider switching to Hotmail. Ever“. Well, if you’re one of those people, I guess I won’t be able to sway your opinion.

But if you go to that poll page and scroll down, you will see comments by a user who goes by the name of Galileo Vieira, a member of Microsoft’s Hotmail team. Galileo presents some fairly persuasive arguments as to why you should give Hotmail a chance. Their new UI is quite spiffy, and Microsoft are generally putting some energy into the service.

Is Hotmail a better free email provider than Gmail (or even Yahoo, for that matter)? I would say definitely not, not by a long shot. But I would say that for most users, Hotmail is probably the best service on this list.

Mail.com

If you feel that your email domain name is the most important part of the address, you should definitely check out Mail.com. Its default domain name (@mail.com) is cool enough, and is even one letter shorter than you-know-who. But if you’re looking for something more specific, Mail.com offers an enormous list of alternative domains for you to pick from, such as “Engineer.com”, “Muslim.com”, and even “Secretary.net”.

It also boasts unlimited email storage, drag-and-drop labels, and more.

GMX Mail

GMX claims to be “the free e-mail you’ve been waiting for”, and boasts 13 million users. That may seem like a drop in the bucket compared to how many users the other email provider vendors have, but it’s still a sizable amount. Some of the perks GMX provides include unlimited email storage, as well as attachments of up to 50MB each.

The service is based in Germany, and they also have an Android app that seems slated mainly at German-speaking users.

Update: Reader Lorenzo Spiegel wrote in to share quite a few negative reviews concerning GMX. In fact, if you look at the link, you’ll have a hard time finding even a single positive review about GMX. So, caveat emptor: You may be better served by one of the other alternatives in this post. Thank you, Lorenzo!

Hushmail

Hushmail is a bit more of an esoteric service. Their main claim to fame is that fact they provide “private, secure” free email accounts. Why the quote marks, you ask? Because Hushmail (quite famously) betrayed user trust in 2007 by providing email correspondence to federal agencies, complying to a Canadian court order. You can read a complete analysis of the incident in Wired’s Threat Level column of the time.

In brief, what you should know is that Hushmail’s mechanisms are not completely secure, although they are still significantly more secure than those offered by other free email providers. Conversely, their free option only includes a paltry 25MB of storage – a far cry from the unlimited space offered by some of the other vendors on the list. If privacy is a key concern for you, check out Hushmail, but don’t blindly trust them. Configure your own settings, and don’t give them your encryption key at any stage of the process.

Zoho Mail

Zoho makes a complete suite of online productivity tools, including a spreadsheet, a Wiki service, and more. Zoho Mail is their free email offering, and it looks quite spiffy. If you already use Zoho, that means you have a Zoho Mail account. One of its distinctive feature is that it is 100% ad free – not a single banner in sight.

Gawab.com

Gawab offers email tracking (a way to see if users received your email), 10GB of storage, and other goodies. But above all, it offers built-in support for foreign character encodings, such as Arabic UTF-16. If you write a lot of email in Arabic and are not happy with your current email provider, check out Gawab.

Final Thought

Did I miss an important free email provider? Are you using an unknown provider that is absolutely awesome, and are dying to tell the world about it? Share it all in the comments!

Image Credit: ShutterStock

The post The Top 6 Popular Free Email Providers Online Other Than Gmail & Yahoo appeared first on MakeUseOf.

At first, I couldn’t stand Google Mail (aka GMail) because of the way emails are organized, the format and layout of the email account and other minor details related to personal preference. However, after a while these little idiosyncracies started to grow on me, and after a while I found that I preferred Google mail over Yahoo.

The biggest clincher for me is that Google gives you POP3 or IMAP access for free, while Yahoo makes you pay for the Premium upgrade. Unfortunately, I have this long-standing Yahoo email account with thousands of archived documents, images and conversations going back for almost a decade – so I continue using my Yahoo email account.

To make matters even more interesting, I stuck with Yahoo Email Classic to keep things simple while Yahoo worked through their Beta upgrade, and I’ve never switched.  I’ve always been a Yahoo fan, as evidenced by my recent article on the Yahoo Go mobile email software, and of course the article on Yahoo Calendar.  When it comes to Yahoo email, there are certain things I like about the Classic format, and if you’re a fellow Yahoo Classic mail user, I’ve found a few tips and tricks that can help to streamline and simplify the Yahoo email experience.

Organizing Your Email

The first and most important way to optimize and streamline your email is to group up emails in a way that makes sense to you. If that means organizing emails by topic, then do so. If it’s easier for you to throw all emails from each of your clients into a separate folder, then that’s what you should do. Using email folders is a good way for you to customize your email experience and keep your main email folder cleaned up.

In Yahoo Mail, it really couldn’t be much simpler. In the left navbar, you’ll see a section titled “My Folders” which is probably empty. Next to it you’ll see the “[Add - Edit]” link. Click the “Add” link and a pop-up box lets you type the name of your new folder, and that’s all there is to it.  This is an easy way to just create a folder for every potential category where you often get many emails. The next step is to move those particular emails into your folders.

Just select the emails that you want to move to a folder, and then click the “Move…” dropdown button at the top of your email listings. You’ll discover that every folder you’ve created shows up on the list. Just select the directory you want to move those emails to, and your inbox just got a little bit more clean.

Streamlining New Incoming Email

So you’ve created nice folders and you’ve nicely cleaned out your inbox after years of letting it get all built up and cluttered, but how do you keep it clean? Just like when you pick up the house after the kids make a mess, the very next day you know they’re going to do the same thing all over again. When folks send you new mail, it’s going to plop right back into your nice empty inbox. You could always work your tail off moving and organizing all new emails into their respective folders – but why do that when you can automate the process using email filters? You can access Yahoo’s email filtering system using the options button at the upper right corner of your email listings.

Just click on “Mail Options” and you’ll find that Yahoo email is a whole lot more customizable than you probably thought.

As you can see, you can automatically insert a signature into all of your emails, manage spam email (Yahoo email is configured to do this for you by default, but you can “tweak” the settings if you want), or configure a vacation auto-response. Pop & Forwarding is for Premium only. The option we’re interested in at the moment is the “Filters” link, so go ahead and click on it.

InYahoo Mail Classic, the view for filters looks like the old format, but the premise is the same. You’re allowed up to 100 filters which, for my purposes, is far more than enough. Creating a filter involves filling out the three sections above – the filter name (make it something obvious), creating the rule for the filter and then which folder to move the emails to if the incoming email matches the description.

The rules are pretty simple – you can filter incoming emails based on words or phrases within the header, To and CC fields, the subject or even text within the body of the email itself.  Yes, you can also forward select emails to your mobile device by clicking the little box at the bottom.

Little Known Features of Yahoo Mail

There’s no doubt that Yahoo Mail is not an email account that you’ll be writing home about. However, there are a few little features that at least add a little bit of flexibility to your emailing experience while you’re there. The first feature is the ability to extract either all of the attachments or all of the images that are attached to any of your existing emails.

You can use this feature by clicking either “My Photos” or “My Attachments” in the “Search Shortcuts” box on the left navbar. When you click “My Attachments” for example, you’ll find search results of every single attachment you’ve ever received.  These are sorted into file types, as shown here.

This is extremely useful for when you know you’ve received a file from someone, but you just can’t find it. By being able to bypass the emails and just search by attachment or photo, you can quickly find the file that you’re looking for.

Composing emails in Yahoo isn’t anything to cheer about either, but there are a few little features that are worth mentioning. You can add a background template to your emails – either solid color, or one of those horribly annoying “picture” backgrounds. Throughout your email, you can embed HTML links just like a regular online editor (like WordPress), and you can also highlight a word using a variety of highlight colors – useful for when you’re editing someone’s writing or otherwise want to point out a section of text.

Finally, while Yahoo doesn’t allow you to connect to your Yahoo email account through POP, apparently it’s OK for you to add other email accounts to your Yahoo webmail account. While this is certainly an effective way to block users from using other webmail accounts to read Yahoo email, it’s also a great way to frustrate users enough so that they decide to opt to avoid using Yahoo entirely. I suspect (and hope) that Yahoo may change this particular free limitation in due course.  Next time, I’ll switch over the “All New Mail” view and describe how Yahoo’s new layout is both better and worse than the Yahoo Mail Classic version.

Do you like Yahoo email, or do you avoid it like the plague? Do you know of any useful features within the free webmail system? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

The post Top 5 Yahoo Mail Classic Tips & Tricks appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Affixa integrates your Google Mail and Yahoo! Mail accounts into Windows but not through a desktop mail application. Instead, it will ask you which webmail service you would like to use to compose your email, then log in to the appropriate accounts online in your browser!

Furthermore, you can manage large email attachments using Affixa by the built-in file sharing with drop.io.

With the free version you can add one webmail account of your choice. If you need to manage several accounts, you can upgrade for £2 per year and add all of your email accounts, including the use of your desktop mail programs. This will come in handy for those of you who use the same computer, but different email accounts for work and play.

Affixa works in a very cool way. In order to fully understand how it handles your email, watch this video.

Now, that you get the drift of how it works, let me delve into one of its best features: drop.io integration.

Most providers put a limit on file type or size that can be sent with each email. If you frequently need to send large files that will crack this limit, you will love Affixa because it integrates file hosting.

Files will automatically be uploaded to drop.io and the link to your files will be pasted into the email you’re going to compose. From within Affixa, you define for how long your files will live after being uploaded or viewed for the last time.

Affixa comes with an attachments manager that is represented in the system tray by a green point. Here you can create baskets that will hold files you’re going to email. Fill up the basket throughout your day or project (drag and drop supported), save, edit, close and open (re-use) them as needed — you have nothing to worry about because once you decide to send a basket, the latest version of each file will be fetched from your system.

Before checking out and attaching the files to an email, you can shrink files by zipping them, resize photos or use drop.io by default. You can send a basket by clicking the Email button, which will launch your email service. The files will be automatically attached to the email.

I have previously reviewed gAttach , a similar Windows desktop application that would integrate Gmail into Windows, so you could make it your default desktop eMail client. This tool has since been discontinued, although you can still download it from Cnet.

Download Affixa and give it a whirl. You might end up leaving your desktop mail program.

Are you still using desktop mail programs or is it all webmail for you? Is POP mail passé? We’d love to hear your opinions in the comments!

The post How to Send Big Files & Auto-open mailto Links in Gmail / Yahoo appeared first on MakeUseOf.

A while ago MakeUseOf published a quick Yahoo! Go Review, which offers a good overview of what’s included in Yahoo! Go. Below, you’ll find some sample shots from the application and a description of the kind of mobile connectivity you can accomplish by using this application.

Yahoo! Go Keeps You Connected to All of Your Online Activities

Once you install Yahoo! Go, the first thing you’ll notice is a pretty cool, well-designed “carousel,” which lets you scroll through the list of applications that are loaded by default.

The nice thing about the carousel is that with just one finger, you can scroll left or right through your applications. Depending on your phone’s keypad or navigation buttons, you can then “select” that application to open it.

Yahoo! Go comes preloaded with a number of basic apps like email, weather and maps, but you may also want to add specific applications that you use a lot, like for sites such as Yahoo Buzz, Facebook or eBay.

To add more widgets, you can scroll to and select the “add widgets” application.

Here you’ll find a long list of applications, ranging from very cool to very lame. For my purposes, I’ve added Facebook, eBay, Yahoo Buzz and several other small apps like a tip calculator, Yahoo Answers, and a shopping tool for checking product prices. There are enough applications in the library to really tailor Yahoo! Go to the sort of things that you like (or need) to do when you’re on the go.

Using Popular Applications Like Facebook and eBay

My favorite part of using Yahoo! Go is the fact that I can immediately connect to a simple mobile version of Facebook and eBay, two applications that I use a lot. Facebook takes a little work to get set up – you need to submit a request on the mobile app for a PIN, which you receive when you log into your account on the Internet.

Once your account is set up, reading Facebook updates from your friends (and adding your own) is easy, and very addictive!

As you can see above, on the screen to the right, you can quickly update your status from your phone, updating your friends and family instantly without the need to find a computer.  You can also scroll down to view your friends updates and even post comments to their “wall” from your phone.

Another application I use constantly is eBay. This app is excellent for when you’re shopping, yardsaling, or at an auction and you want to check out what similar items are going for on eBay. Setting up this app is nowhere near as complicated as Facebook, you simply sign in and you’re good to go.

If you’re into buying a lot of items on eBay, the “items I’m bidding on,” and “items I’m watching,” sections will give you an advantage. No matter where you are, you can keep an eye on when the auction for items you’re interested in are going to end, and you can time your final bids accordingly.

Common Yahoo Widgets

Of course, I find that I use the more common Yahoo widgets the most. If you’re normally a Yahoo user anyway, and have a Yahoo email account, news settings, and weather preferences, you’ll get much more use out of Yahoo! Go. For example, whenever I’m bored in a doctor’s waiting room, I always find myself pulling out my phone to read the news.

Within the news app, you can also select specific news sources that you’re most interested in. For example, above you can see that I’ve added two feeds from a couple of my favorite paranormal websites. If you’re more interested in what people are saying, rather than mainstream news reports, then Yahoo Buzz is the place to check out. Of course, you can access that from Yahoo! Go as well, as you can see on the right in the image below.

On the left, above, is the calendar application, which is plugged directly into your online Yahoo calendar. This means that when you’re in your office and you’ve entered a list of appointments and event dates that you don’t want to forget, you can access those calendar entries from your mobile phone by using the Yahoo calendar widget.

Useful Yahoo Widgets For Travelers

Whenever I’m on a trip, the apps that I find are the most useful are Yahoo! Maps and Yahoo! Weather. It helps that both applications save all of your normal Yahoo preferences from when you use them online, so even when you’re on your mobile device, all of your normal location settings are preloaded for you.

Unlike Google Maps, Yahoo hasn’t yet integrated cellphone triangulation technology into them so that you can zero in on your current location, but Yahoo maps does have the ability to utilize any GPS technology that you might have installed on your phone. As you can see above, you can display weather for multiple locations at once, and of course you can look up the weather (and forecasts) for any location in the world.

The “OneSearch” widget is the heart of Yahoo! Go. From this one location you can perform a quick search for phone numbers (like the local pizza delivery place), access your address or phonebook, or quickly read up on the latest news.

While there are plenty of choices out there for mobile users, Yahoo users in particular will find Yahoo! Go to be one of the most reliable and useful ways to stay online even when you’re on the go.

Do you use Yahoo! Go, or do you prefer other mobile all-in-one applications?  Share your opinion in the comments section below.

The post Using Yahoo Go to Stay Connected On Your Mobile appeared first on MakeUseOf.

For people like me who had hundreds of emails in our Yahoo inboxes (and no money in our pockets) that was a sad day. Letting Yahoo take care of our emails and not having access to important emails when we wanted them was a big disappointment. I lived with the fear of losing my emails for a long time and then one day I came across this wonderful utility called YahooPOPs!

YPOPs lets you use an offline email client to download and send emails from your Yahoo account, just as it used to be. In other words, YPOPs acts as a POP3 and SMTP proxy for your Yahoo mail account.

To get started, download the YPOPs installer and install it on your Windows machine. The installer will ask you if you want YPOPs to start automatically when Windows starts. If you want that option, say yes or leave it alone. I like to leave programs out of the start up routine, so I’ll pass on this one. I’ll manually start YPOPs when I want to.

Now, comes the configuration part.

YPOPs, when started, will quietly settle down in the task bar and to configure it, you’ll just have to right click the icon and click on “configure”.

You can leave pretty much all the settings as it is except the Network settings.

The only thing in the Network settings that I had to change for YPOPs to work on my box were the POP3 and SMTP ports. For some reason, YPOPs refused to work with the default POP and SMTP ports, so I changed the POP3 port to 5110 and the SMTP port to 5125. That’s it!

To read emails offline, I use the excellent open source program called Thunderbird.

When you start Thunderbird for the first time, it’ll ask you to set up an email account to work with. Move along, enter your name and the email address that you want to work with <username@yahoo.com> and enter localhost as the POP server and localhost as the SMTP server name. Click next and finish.

When you’re finished, Thunderbird will offer to download emails from the account that you just started. If you let it download emails right now, Thunderbird will fail with an error saying it couldn’t connect to the server or something to that effect. This is normal since, by default, Thunderbird would have chosen port 110 for POP3 and port 25 for SMTP, which is not what we set in YPOPs.

To change the port settings for Thunderbird, go to Tools -> Account Settings, and under Server Settings, change the port to 5110 from the default of 110.

To change the SMTP port, on the same window, go to Outgoing Server (SMTP) and click on Edit and change the SMTP port to 5125 from the default of 25.

That’s it. Go back to the main Thunderbird window and click on Send/Receive. You should now be able to send and receive all your Yahoo email from within Thunderbird and no one will ever come to know the difference. Plus, you never have to see those ugly advertisements on the Yahoo mail website :-)

You don’t even have to use Thunderbird to use YPOPs. You can continue using your favorite emailing client and add a second account to be used for Yahoo mail. Just make sure that you change the POP3 and SMTP ports to match the ones you set in the YPOPs configuration window.

If you have any problems setting it up, leave a question in the comments and we’ll try and help you out.

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