Best Free Web Mail Accessory

If you use Yahoo! mail then head straight for YPOPs! This allows you to download your Yahoo webmail from within a POP3 email client such as Outlook, Thunderbird or Eudora. It's free, easy to set up using the instructions on the web site, and is simple to use. I use it on multiple Yahoo accounts and it works wonderfully.

The second suggestion is a utility called FreePOPs. It's a much more flexible product than YPOPs! and will download mail from HotMail, AOL, Yahoo!, Juno, Libero and a myriad of other webmail services. Its power and flexibility can confuse new users, but thankfully there is a clearly written tutorial for beginners. FreePOPS is for receiving email only and has no sending capabilities.

A third possibility is MrPostman which offers similar functionality to FreePOPs and allows access to email accounts on MS Exchange 5.5 as well. It needs a bit of fiddling to work correctly, but this link will help. My only reservation is that product development seems to have ceased. Note that MrPostman requires the Java Runtime Environment to be installed on your PC.

Another webmail accessory you might find useful is POP Peeper, a free utility that lets you know when new mail arrived in your Webmail account. It installs a little tray icon that alerts you to new mail in your Hotmail, MSN, Yahoo, Mail.com, MyWay, Excite, Lycos.com, or RediffMail accounts. It's particularly useful for users who have multiple webmail services. It won't though, download your mail to your POP3 email client. To do that you need one of the products above. It does however, allow you to read and even respond to your mail within the product without opening your email program. This makes it very attractive to Webmail users who don't use a regular email client such as Outlook or Thunderbird.

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