Webmail offline - preserve your info

• Yahoo! webmail slow reading 25 messages at a time?
  
• Want to back up your mail and contacts?
• 300 contact limit of the Online Address Book too low?
  
• Tired of SPAM filters that don't work well?
• Your Yahoo ID was deleted - lost everything?
  
• Someone been hacked - lost access to their account?
• Want to read emails faster aka offline? (not online)
  

One time techie work
These are the times when it makes sense to delve into a bit of techie stuff once to protect your information. The offline reading speed improvement compared to webmail is unbelievable to most. One can go thru and read 50 messages and delete 150 others in minutes when it used to take almost an hour in webmail!

It's VERY simple to read and do. Once this 5 minute one-time task is done the rest is reading and sending mail. If you've used web mail before the change is small as you already have experienced most of the basics.

Email program - choosing and obtaining it
One of the first things to do is choosing, obtaining and setting up an email program at your home PC. All modern Windows have Outlook Express already installed. Three steps already done with no effort! The remaining task is to point it to your personal ISP email account. This one time step is the last one between you and reading the first email! Now you can read mail from family, friends, new acquaintances and co-workers offline and back them up.

What if you use Yahoo! webmail?
Do you use Yahoo's free webmail as a second account for your online persona? (1) Well, for offline reading you have to download a free helper program called Ypops. This one time installation is VERY easy! We have a how-to page with pictures about Ypops installation to ease your pain. Honest, it's VERY simple ;-) Outlook Express can handle both your real life e-mail account and your second one or you can use another program (to keep them separated).

SPAM - got to much spam man?
Using Thunderbird (a free download) or MS Office Outlook 2003/2007 opens up the world to beating SPAM. Both these programs learn from you what you consider SPAM and move those messages to the Junk mail folder automatically. Anything it misses you can correct for the next time. After a few days spam will be at an all time low.

See, that wasn't so bad, right?

1) FWIW these email services will try to sell premium access for $20+ a month! They make it sound like it's the only way to read email offline on your PC. What they're leaving out is that it's also possible to do this WITHOUT paying for their extra service.