Previewing email content in Yahoo inbox?

July 13, 2007 4:04 PM

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?

posted by cda to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

If he spends $20/yr for Mail Plus then he can access the Yahoo mail through Thunderbird or Outlook.
posted by JJ86 at 4:18 PM on July 13, 2007

GMail is the greatest thing ever, obviously. Will Yahoo allow him to forward his mail to a GMail account? Can GMail automatically fetch his Yahoo mail by enabling POP access in GMail? Perusing this may help. GMail will allow him to respond to email and make it look like his email came from his Yahoo account. It's very simple, as you probably know.
posted by HotPatatta at 5:42 PM on July 13, 2007

You're probably aware of this, but the Yahoo Mail Beta (the new optional one they came out with not too long ago) allows you to preview the message in a pane when you click on it once. So obviously, you still have to click on it (or be automatically scrolled down to it after deleting a message above it) but its still faster than the old school version of actually going into each and every email.

This saves me an immense amount of time getting rid of crap email compared to before.
posted by Defenestrator at 7:36 PM on July 13, 2007

Gmail will pop3 fetch from other servers.
posted by BrotherCaine at 8:53 PM on July 13, 2007

Yahoo.com allows POP access if you pay for it; yahoo.com.au and yahoo.co.uk allowed it for free, last time I looked.
posted by flabdablet at 3:08 AM on July 14, 2007

Response by poster: Although I agree it's the best solution I probably won't just send his mail to Gmail because we do that with our eFaxes and every once in a while Google changes their spam parameters and we stop getting some of our eFaxes. It's been a pain. And it makes the clients very nervous.

All his email is important (people's financial info - he's an accountant) so we can't really experiment much.

We can't really use a mail reader like thunderbird because it messes with our satellite Internet (the satelitte connection ceaselessly downloads some emails and our service will be terminated if that happens.)

I think I'll look more into the new yahoo mail beta.

Thanks everyone, you've been very helpful.
posted by cda at 1:23 PM on July 14, 2007

POP3 is a bit susceptible to the old "download forever" sickness. In Thunderbird, you can limit it by choosing Tools->Accounts, clicking on Disk Space under the account concerned, and setting a reasonable limit (say 100k). You can also turn off "check for new messages at startup", "check for new messages every (n) minutes", and "automatically download new messages" which will put you firmly in control over when Thunderbird uses your net connection.
posted by flabdablet at 6:28 PM on July 15, 2007