Yahoo Mail on IPhone

I’m somewhat in love with my IPhone, and believe it is the world’s second greatest invention (with first place going to Sky Plus – obviously).   One of the great things about it, it the way it seamlessly integrated my Yahoo! Mail account, and though I’m hardly reliant on it, it is a very handy feature.

Which is why is was so annoying when it suddenly stopped working yesterday; coming up with a message that “user name or password is incorrect”, even though I hadn’t changed either.  After confirming that I could access the account OK on my laptop, I did a bit of googling, and found this Yahoo! Answers thread:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090606050943AAzbmXS

Some people with the same problem but no answers. I checked again today and saw the advice from “da la mon” to set up the account via the “Your Mobile” feature.  This did get me back working technically, but there are definitely a few caveats. 

If you’re having this problem, you need to log in to Yahoo! Mail on your PC, and click the “Your Mobile” link towards the top right of the screen.  You have to provide your password, and then some details about your mobile phone, including the phone number.  This then sends you an activation code on a text message, which you enter.  It then offers to take you through a tutorial on setting up the account.  Now, even if you are fairly competent technically, it’s well worth going through this process as the settings are not entirely straightforward.   For example, you don’t set it up as a “Yahoo! Mail” account but as an “Other”.  Please pay attention to the settings, as you no longer put in your actual e-mail address, but a new one that is generated based on your phone number.

Also, the password you have to put in is NOT the password you use to log in to the account normally.   I possibly missed where this is stated during the set up, as I did not realise until later.  I had set up the account following the tutorial, but assumed that the password was my normal one.  Once the settings were entered and I tried to test, it complained saying that the user name or password was incorrect.  By chance, I read the welcome e-mail that they send as a test (I read it on my PC), and noticed that it contained a different pasword.  Once I put this password in it connected OK.

It’s all slightly more complicated than just putting your username and password in as was done previously.

Even when you’re up and running, things are not great.  Firstly, you only get to see Inbox & Sent Items, and not all your subfolders as you could before.   You also only see the messages sent and received since the account was set up, unlike seeing your most recent 50 messages, as before.  This is a real annoyance for anyone who files their e-mails away for future reference.

Even worse, when you send an e-mail from your phone, it comes from the new phone-number based address, rather than your Yahoo address. This means you are effectively advertising your phone number to anyone you happen to e-mail.  If you are sending a message to someone you don’t know that well, this is not too advisable.

I can only assume that this is a new security measure by Yahoo, but it’s really disappointing.  To my knowledge, there have been no warning e-mails to say that this was going to happen, and has presumably left a lot of people unable to work.  Perhaps, it is just a glitch, but there seems to still be remarkably little info around about it.  If anyone knows a a way to get this working in the old way, then it would be much appreciated.

P.S.

This post may seem like something of a departure from my normal posts.  Basically, I left an answer on the Yahoo Answers thread, and felt it was a waste not to turn it in to a post.  Rest assured, normal service will be resumed shortly.