MTM2.com

I use Yahoo email too, but I simplified access to it by creating a bookmark to my personal yahoo email page and placing it in my browser's FAVORITES directory in a folder I named !EMAIL.

I put an exclaimation mark "!" at the beginning of the folder name so it will always be at the top of the list even if I sort them alphabetically.

Hey there Kdawg, if you use a free web based e-mail like Yahoo! you generally cannot use an e-mail client to access your mail, but must use a web browser. However, if you are a paying customer you can generally use an e-mail client. Mail clients (like Thunderbird) access mail servers using POP3 or the less common IMAP protocols, and rare is the web based e-mail sevice that allows POP3 access, although you can easily look in their help to find out. As for setting up an e-mail client, every ISP or e-mail service will have easy instructions for setting up your specific client to access their servers, almost without exception.

As for Yahoo and other web based e-mail, when I can I extract their forms and put them in my own custom portal/home pages, stored on my hard drive. Doing so I can pre-fill the forms and just click a button to log in.

If anyone is interested, click <a href=http://mtm2.com/~trackville/utils/Yahoo!.zip>HERE</a> and save this (zipped) webpage to your hard drive, then edit it with notepad and input your own username and password. I put a note inside the html source code to help you along. With that you'll have the yahoo login form on your hard drive, filled in and ready to click, just bookmark it or put a shortcut to it on your desktop. You can change the page colors in the "body" section to your liking too. It's easy. Note: the two forms you'll see are the http [standard] and httpS [secure] versions of the login, you can use whichever you like, you can also copy and paste the existing forms if you have additional accounts)

I'm definitely not an expert but here's someone who is: Introduction to Thunderbird

I use T-bird (and previously Outlook Express) for accessing the email account provided by my ISP, and in that case it is a specific mail server for which the connection details (incoming POP server and outgoing SMTP server, etc) are given to us by the ISP. Some (but not all) web-based email services that you log into via a page in your browser (like Yahoo), may allow you to access your account through a mail program like OE/T-bird - look for information about POP or IMAP server settings, and that's the stuff you'll have to put into the account configuration for T-bird.

(edit) Got me Quicksdraw