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Last release of Yahoo Mail's web interface seems to have nearly broken their search (half the time, the search results are unresponsive or exibit various buggy behavior).

I'm looking for software which can be used to do full text searching on Yahoo Mail instead of its native broken search.

Requirements:

  • Free from Yahoo standpoint (as in, using it won't require me to pay for some Yahoo mail premium features like POP access).
  • Not very expensive as software (<$5-$10, gratis prefered)
  • Searches existing mail - e.g. doesn't depend on some service intercepting newly arrived emails only - in pretty large account (10k+ messages in 50 folders)
  • Search results must provide: email sender, subject, date, folder.
  • Can either search by specific fields (e.g. search for specific phrase in subject only, or specific sender; or by specific dates, or in specific folder); OR filter/narrow down search results by such fields.
  • Won't get me in trouble with Yahoo (for example by downloading 10MB of my emails every 5 seconds). Specifically, aside from one-time download, it should NOT consume significantly more download bandwith compared to simply reading mail by a person.

Preferred features:

  • Fast. A search on email containing 10k+ messages in 50 folders should take no longer than 10-15 seconds.
  • Support for >1 Yahoo Mail account.
  • Search results should preferably provide: Snippet of text surrounding search term(s)
  • Ideally, search result can be clicked to view the entire mail text - but does NOT have to be in Yahoo mail account (in other words, a cached copy of mail text in local database is fine. 100% fidelity/displaying images/attachments is not required).
  • "fancy" searching: search for a quoted phrase; search for mails containing every one of a list of phrases; search for mails excluding specific phrase (e.g. "searchword1 -excludeword2").
  • Non-English searching (at least, Unicode; and ideally other standard encodings like KOI-8 or ISO ones)
  • It would be absolutely amazing if this search could be integrated in search results of Everything search engine.

Acceptable downsides/missing features:

  • The search does NOT need to be real-time.

    What I mean is that if it updates its local DB once a day; and the search misses any emails that arrived in the last 24 hours ago or less, I'm perfectly fine with that. The main use case is searching for older emails I can't find by simply scanning last day's worth visually.

  • The search doesn't need to support actual email functionality (e.g. I don't need to be able to view the found mail with high fidelity, see attachments or images; respond to email etc...)

  • Don't care about things like saving prior search terms, caching search results, sharing anything on social media, or cooking me breakfast.


I would prefer a dedicated local search solution, but if there's an easy cheap way to do this in a less straightforward way (for example importing 100% of your Yahoo mail emails into GMail and using GMail search) I'm OK with that.

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  • 1
    I haven't used yahoo in ages - what free external mail client protocols do they support? Feb 27, 2014 at 1:22
  • 2
    @JourneymanGeek - they have something weird going with POP/IMAP - not sure if it's free and/or legal. Someone who answers would likely have to have knowledge of Yahoo specific answer, NOT generic POP/IMAP. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Mail#Free_version.
    – DVK
    Feb 27, 2014 at 2:00

1 Answer 1

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According to the official Yahoo! help:

IMAP is the best way to connect your Yahoo Mail account to a desktop mail client or mobile app.

Incoming Mail (IMAP) Server

  • Server - imap.mail.yahoo.com
  • Port - 993
  • Requires SSL - Yes

etc.

More information is available where I took that from: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN4075.html

Therefore, you can search it in any mail client that supports IMAP: Thunderbird, Zimbra Desktop, Sylpheed, even (gasp!) Outlook.

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