Yahoo Small Biz Email and the iPhone

Don’t you just love it when the free version of something gets better features than the pay version? Such is the case with Yahoo! email and the Apple iPhone. Free Yahoo Mail gets a really nice IMAP push-style email on the iPhone. It works really well and I use it for my free account.

Then there’s my Yahoo Small Business email account with my own domain name. For $9.95 per month, I get POP email but no IMAP. I’m continually annoyed that I’m paying for a service and get LESS service than the free account. I could set up the IMAP through the Yahoo account on the iPhone and it would receive email but it wouldn’t send email. Needless to say, that’s a less than optimal solution, so I’d been using POP (grudgingly). I’d had high hopes for the iPhone 2.0 software upgrade, but it didn’t change anything.

Then I found my new best friend, Dave. Dave had the same problem I had with the iPhone and the Yahoo small biz email and he found a workaround and detailed the solution on his blog. I followed Dave’s directions and I now have a working solution for receiving and sending my Yahoo small biz email. Fundamentally, you manually set up the IMAP for receiving email and then use the SMTP settings for sending email. It works fine for my custom domain on Yahoo small biz email. It’s a bit tedious to set up, but once it was set up, it’s been working great. I’ve been using it this way for about a week and not had any problems sending or receiving.

While Yahoo gets their act together to offer IMAP to their paying customers, I’ll continue to use this great workaround. Thanks Dave!!