Yahoo Small Buisness Mail - IMAP with the iPhone
Ok so I had a hell of a time figuring out how to configure my iPhone to work with Yahoo's IMAP servers. I had read quite a few sites claiming that Yahoo does not support IMAP for small buisness class accounts. What? Why would they allow IMAP for free yahoo accounts and yet pay buisness web hosting accounts the service is not provided? Well I assumed it has something to do with the IMAP service not fully being tested. I noticed that when Yahoo launched thier new Webmail interface, it took almost two to three months before Emaild web mail had the ability to use the new interface. This was because Yahoo beta tests new features on free subscribers. This I assume is the same thing...
BUT! It is there, you just have to figure out how to get it.
Yes, you can configure your iPhone to access your domain's yahoo mail through POP and SMTP. I did this for the last 2 months I've had the phone. But I realized that IMAP is a lot faster and it's synced with the servers PLUS it's a PUSH mail service which I like.
Why did I try to figure this out? 1. I'm a geek and I'm persistant to find solutions to everything and 2. IMAP access has better performance with the Yahoo servers and 3. It's push mail.
SO how to configure it?
1. Settings Icon on the Phone
2. Mail
3. Add Account
4. Don't choose Yahoo, choose 'Other'. Interestingly if you setup your email with the Yahoo account it works. I did this and setup my address as emailaddy (at) email (dot) net (replace the 'at' with @ and 'dot' with . and use your own email user name address) with my passowrd and I was able to get mail and it synched with yahoo's IMAP servers. BUT I soon realized I had a problem SENDING mail. This is because you need to use SMTP for outbound mail and you can't configure that properly on the phone with Yahoo.
5. So use this configuration
Name: You name you want people to see
Address: Your email address
Description: What you want the phone to display in your email account lists
Incoming Host: imap.mail.yahoo.com
Username: your email address hosted by yahoo
Password: Your password
Outgoing Host: smtp.bizmail.yahoo.com:25
username: your email address
Password: your password
Save it. It will try to save for a while and it may (did for me) ask you to try to attempt to Save it without SSL? Click 'Yes'! Then it will be "thinking" for a while. Don't worry, this may take a LONG while but eventually it should save off successfully.
That's it! You should now have IMAP access with push mail on your yahoo small buisness hosted web solution.
Works great for me!
EDIT - 3/13/2009 ---
I've had a SLEW of people hit my blog specifically on this topic. So to clear up some confusion, I should note that this solution does not work on WIFI so all you iPod Touch users, this isn't going to work. Sorry! I personally have to shut off Wifi to get my IMAP mail from my personal yahoo small business account.
Hope this helps!