Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with GMail and yahoo

YaBOOOO! Or, convince me that Gmail is all that.

small_ruminant — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:30:05 -0800

I have had Yahoo! email for 15 years, but their newest upgrade is driving me away. For some reason, Gmail just irritates me. Please talk me out of my distaste for the gargantuan, be-tentacled monster that is Google or speak to me of better email providers.

The problems I'm having with the new Yahoo are that 1) it's now hecka slow to load and 2) it keeps corrupting the attachments I receive, so that if I don't save them the first time I look at them, I can't see them or the email they're attached to ever again.

I have given it a month and it's just irritating me more, so I think it's time to give up on it.

I also hate Yahoo's new chat, but that's not an important feature to me.

I have a gmail account that I use so seldom that it takes me forever to figure out my username. All the different panes of conversation are confusing to me. But mostly I don't like how it keeps trying to use my gmail login for everything. When I go to google.com, there's my login up top (look! I'm still logged in!). Ick.

I don't want to have to worry about being COMPLETELY logged out of gmail when I'm switching around and I worry for some reason about giving more info than I want to to the websites I browse. I use Internet Explorer and only delete my cookies at the end of the day, so it's not like I'm not giving out info willy nilly already, but I'd prefer to feel like I'm actually logged out when I close my email. I hate looking up in the corner and discovering that google is still displaying my username.

I use multiple email addresses (for personal and professional and throwaway, etc) and I use a relatively old PC, if it matters.

"Could not validate this combination of email address and password."

pleasebekind — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 10:07:47 -0800

[Gmail filter] I am trying to import all my stuff (mail, contacts, folders) from Yahoo to Gmail but I have encountered an error and can't find the solution anywhere. Help, please? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? This is what I have been following. However, I've encountered an error in Step 4. I keep getting this message:

"Could not validate this combination of email address and password."

My e-mail address and password are correct. I don't know why there's an error. I went to the Troubleshoot section but after answering a few questions, the endpoint was to go to the forum and post my issue. I searched the forum and found this; and nobody seems to have replied/helped them yet.

I tried searching everywhere for an answer but to no avail. Someone in the forum suggested enabling the POP3 option in Yahoo -- but that only works in so far as importing/forwarding mail that's in the inbox. I want everything to be imported, including mail that's in my folders, and I want to do this in the least stressful way possible (hence going for the automated Gmail import feature, which failed).

From my understanding it's possible to import *all* mail, even for regular Yahoo mail users, and that you don't have to upgrade to Yahoo Plus. So what am I doing wrong? My google-fu has failed me. Would really appreciate help on this one.

Nonsense email hacking?

Wroksie — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 04:08:33 -0800

My email address is firstname.lastname@gmail.com. Over the last few days, almost every email I got was followed by a weird 'delivery status notification (failure)' message... it was saying that the message had bounced bounced back from 'firstname.lastname@yahoo.co.uk'. It took me about a day to realise I needed check the forwarding rules, and in fact this was a forwarding rule that someone... not me... had set up to forward every mail I received to this yahoo address. Very strange... especially since firstname.lastname@yahoo.co.uk is not an address I have ever registered for or used and it appears to be available, so no one has it or is checking it. If someone was going to hack my email to set this up, wouldn't they set it to forward to an address that exists? And considering thatt I change my email password to new, random sT5!?88fg type passwords every few weeks, how did I get hacked to begin with?

I'm so confused.

Why do I have POP access to my yahoo.com e-mail?

bdk3clash — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 14:17:49 -0800

Why do I appear to have POP access to my yahoo.com e-mail address via GMail? Everything I've read suggests that I *shouldn't* be able to access my yahoo.com e-mail via GMail, since I use Yahoo's free e-mail and not the paid version.

However, I added my yahoo.com e-mail account to my GMail account and lo and behold it's fetching the mail via POP no problem.

Why do I have this access? Possible mitigating factors include the fact that I have a paid Flickr account, and that I've had this yahoo.com e-mail address since around 1997 or so and may have been "grandfathered" in or something.

Followup Question: Getting popped Yahoo mails back into email account

sk381 — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:47:15 -0800

As a follow up to this question, can I use the following scheme to get all my popped emails back into my Yahoo account? If I create a new Gmail account, set it to forward all 'new' incoming mail to an existing Yahoo email (the one that I had downloaded all the emails via POP in the first place), mark all my popped emails as unread in ThunderBird, and upload them into my new Gmail account via IMAP, will they be treated as 'new emails' and hence forwarded to my Yahoo account?

I tried to use one of the suggestions given in response to my previous question, but I think Gmail requires SSL which the 'Add an External Mail Account' of Yahoo doesn't support at the moment.

Previewing email content in Yahoo inbox?

cda — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 16:04:51 -0800

In the Yahoo email inbox - is there a way to see the first sentence of the email like I am shown in my Gmail inbox? I can tell right away if a message is spam in my Gmail account because it shows the first sentence and even if the subject sounds like a business client I can tell instantly if it is spam from the first sentence which shows in my Gmail inbox right after the subject.

My SO uses Yahoo and he has a terrible time being able to tell if an email is spam without clicking on it to read the content (He has over 600 clients he corresponds with by email). He can't change his email to Gmail. Is there any way he can change a preference in Yahoo to be able to preview the content of an email?

Troubles with email forwarding..

MJaffaDMB — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 22:31:58 -0800

Is there a way to automatically forward mail in a Yahoo account to a Gmail account without upgrading to mail plus??

Help me help my Mom get off of AOL!

Sprout the Vulgarian — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 07:47:18 -0800

Help me convince my mother to switch from aol to gmail. My mother is a brilliant English teacher, but she is somewhat technology-averse. She has been using an aol address forever (since they got internet in the '90s while I was in college), and she has never liked the whole aol interface, with all those bells and whistles and horribleness. However, she doesn't like the idea of switching, and notifying people, and learning a new program.

I have already registered a gmail account for her. Here's where I would really like guidance:

1. What email program should I get her set up with? Obviously, she'll be able to use the browser-based gmail interface, but I think she would prefer to use a software program where she can read and compose off-line. I'd like something easy-to-use and familiar to her. I use Thunderbird, but I think she'd hate it, and I'm leaning toward Outlook. Suggestions?

2. What is the fastest, easiest way for her to transition, contacts-wise? I expect to import her contacts into the new program, and maybe set up a forwarding filter and/or automated reply on AOL. I have zero experience with the AOL interface, so I don't know what I'm walking into. Anyone who's aided in such a transition, I'd love advice on this.

3. How do I talk her through general AOL withdrawal? She is afraid of change in the computer realm, but she does know that this is a good move to make. I would appreciate any tips from folks who've helped encourage friends/family make a switch like this.

What is the best free web-based email service?

frogan — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 20:32:07 -0800

What is the best free web-based email service? What is the best free web-based email service? I'm looking for something besides Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail. I've tried all three. All of them have their idiosyncracies. Gmail seems to be cool kid on the block, but I absolutely hate their "conversation" system of grouping email. It's remarkably unintuitive to me.

In my perfect world, it would be Gmail without the baloney conversation system.

Is there any other ones out there worth looking at? Or alternately, any Gmail hacks to deal with the conversation grouping?

Why is IncrediMail duplicating all my messages?

Corky — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 18:47:46 -0800

My email is spazzing out! I use IncrediMail at home to get my Hotmail, Yahoo and GMail messages. Every few weeks, (more often recently) every email in all three accounts will download AGAIN into IncrediMail. Unless I've deleted the original message in Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail, that is. If I leave any messages in my Inboxes, IncrediMail will go get them again. The first time it happened, I got 927 emails going back almost a year.

I know. Hotmail and Yahoo are lame. I got lucky with my email addresses, and don't want to give them up, so I'm sticking with the free email services for that reason only.

What could be causing IncrediMail to think that any message left in my Inboxes are new, and then download them? I don't leave anything unread in any of the free mailboxes, either. I've checked all the settings in IncrediMail, looked through their Help FAQs... nothing jumps out as a solution. The best I can do to make my life easier is to file all my messages that I want to save in individual folders. At least that way I know that anything filling up the IncrediMail Inbox is probably a duplicate. It's maddening!

Emailing Yahoo Groups Archives

jacknose — Thu, 12 May 2005 05:37:05 -0800

I've recently joined a couple of Yahoo! Groups, and I would like to have all the old messages (prior to my joining) sent to me via email. Is that possible? I want to store all the messages in my gmail account so that I can search through them in the future.