Last week, we were very excited about all the possiblities offered by adding OAuth with IMAP/SMTP to Gmail, but as we noted then, don’t let those acronyms cause your eyes to glaze over. What sounds like complicated, techie stuff really means simply useful additions to your email experience and this time, we’re talking about Yahoo Mail, still the leading webmail provider.
As Programmable Web pointed out this morning, it looks like Yahoo actually implemented OAuth several days before Gmail got around to it.
OAuth access to your email means that you can give simple, one-click authorization to external applications to have full access to your emails. This also means you can have seemless access to the information in your email account, from the contents of the emails themselves to your contact list, on other websites.
If you think of going to a website and finding all the people you know on there by using Twitter, you’re most likely already familiar with OAuth – it’s that window that pops up that you click “Allow” on.
From the Yahoo! Mail Developer Community group on March 25:
Today we’re super exited to announce our OAuth API for Yahoo Mail! Not only have we moved to a much cleaner authentication technology, but we have removed all the restrictions limiting message access of “free” accounts. That means that you can now use the full API for all Yahoo Mail users regardless of their free/premium status, accessing full message contents if your application needs it. Cool, eh?
For those of you out there using Yahoo Mail, which is still a majority, expect to see some cool new add-ons for the age old email service to be released soon. At least, that’s what we’re hoping for.
