JPWhite's Tech Blog

Update 2010-04-01

The new android 2.1 firmware for the droid has resolved all the email issues I was having with my droid on Yahoo email. Deleting messages on the droid really does delete off the yahoo account and vice versa. Reading in one place updates the message read indication on the other. It really works like you’d expect it to. The new update is really worth it for yahoo mail users on a droid. For further information on getting the update now visit here.

Original Article:

Verizon do not support Yahoo email on the Droid. They do on a Blackberry, but not the Droid, and with good reason, it is unreliable.

Outgoing email can easily get stuck in the Droid’s outbox. I found that email could sit there ‘forever’, but switching the phone off and on again would temporarily resolve the problem and mail would be sent. Not wanting to power off the droid every time I sent email from my Yahoo account on the Droid, I looked for another solution.

The solution is to stop using the Yahoo SMTP (Outgoing email) servers and use another service that is compatible with the Droid. One could use the GMail SMTP server for instance, however I found that a copy of the outgoing message was received as incoming email on the gmail account I used. Not what I was looking for.  Instead I chose to use AUTHSMTP a paid SMTP service I have used for several years. By setting the outgoing email settings as detailed here (Go directly to Step 7, the other steps are specific for an iPhone),  I was successful in sending outgoing email with immediate delivery, just the way it’s meant to work!! (For some reason I had to set the outgoing port number 2525 twice, it doesn’t take the first time around).

Once Droid and Yahoo are better pals, we can set our smtp settings back to Yahoo, or use whatever application is written for it.

Yahoo incoming email settings can be found here. One has to have the plus version of Yahoo mail for pop access to your Yahoo email.

UPDATE: 2010-01-23 – Supplementing yahoo pop3 email with yahoo IMAP email.

Email works well with pop3 however you don’t get to see email stored in folders on your Yahoo account. Changing to Yahoo IMAP email for mobile sounds like an ideal solution, however I found that email only works on 3G networks, on Wifi Yahoo IMAP does not work at all, in fact your folders will empty out as you view them while connected via WiFi.

To get the best of both worlds I have now setup my Droid as follows.

Setup Pop3/SMTP as detailed in the original post here and set it as your default email account.

Setup IMAP as detailed below

1. Make sure Wi-Fi is turned off (very important to make IMAP work)
2. Launch E-Mail
3. Enter your Yahoo E-Mail address and password
4. Select IMAP as the account type
5. Press “Manual Setup” in the lower left hand corner
6. For “Incoming Server Settings” set the IMAP server to “imap.mail.yahoo.com” and the Port to 143
7. Setup frequency of checking email to never.

Be sure to change the settings on the account to never check for new email. Checking email on IMAP can be done manually when you know for sure you are connected with a 3G network and wish to access your Yahoo email folders.

I use pop access as my default method to read email, it always works on all networks. I use the IMAP account when I need to access email in a folder other than the inbox.

I’m hoping that the Yahoo issues are resolved in the upcoming 2.1 release of android. This is a lot of work just to get email reliably.

UPDATE: 2010-02-08.

Check out a new android email client MailDroid. It promises to solve Yahoo email issues (but I have yet to try it, the comments regarding this app show it has a few rough edges). I think I will wait a while longer since I have it working reasonably well right now.

Update: 2010-03-18 – According to the official Verizon website, the new Android 2.1 update resolves many of the Yahoo email issues. Before changing your Yahoo email settings as detailed below, you should wait for version 2.1 of android first.  (To check version – Menu, Settings, About Phone – look for firmware version 2.1 or later). Time will tell how good the update is. Instructions for manually updating can be found here.