Going through the forums at Crackberry I found a very useful post by one of the most knowledgeable members in there: JRSCCivic98 who posted a short “How to set up your e-mail correctly on your Droid”, and its mostly for us coming from a Blackberry to a Droid (Or any other smartphone for that matter). I found the post to be very useful and even worked for me, so I wanted to share JRSCCivic98’s knowledge with everyone here.

1) Yahoo and Hotmail are NO LONGER “free” services for extensive email support such as 3rd party email client polling. This means that you can no longer use Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, etc. to get and send your Yahoo or Hotmail emails (unless you’ve got an extremely old “grandfathered” email account that they left it enabled on.

2) Your only options in order to get this type of POP3 support enabled on those email accounts is to pay a yearly subscription for them from both Yahoo and Microsoft for their “Plus” services. By doing so, that enables POP3 support on those accounts similar to what GMail has ALWAYS done for FREE.

3) No, it’s not the fault of your smartphone that they started to do this. At one time both Yahoo and Hotmail were free for this capability, then the respective companies got a wild hair up their wazoo to start charging for the service. This left people with new accounts for those service out in the cold once the change was done. Some really old accounts were left enabled, but those are pretty rare nowadays.

4) The reason why both Yahoo and Hotmail work on the Blackberry platform is because RIM spent some money to build partner relations with those 2 companies to get them support for the POP/IMAP polling to work. Without that, it would’t work either. Of course, RIM doesn’t always tell everyone what they do behind the scenes in order to make their product work for the end user. They like to keep you in the dark and when you try to use another smartphone and it doesn’t work, they and every RIM fanboi out there blame the problem on that smartphone rather then the respective email providers.

5) All ISPs will not let you “relay” email through their SMTP servers unless you “Authenticate” first if your traffic does not originate from within their network. Make sure you enable this if it is not on by default and you should be able to send email through them no issues.

Also, before you pay for such services you should try to set up your Yahoo account via IMAP following the next steps:

- Go to mail icon
- Add account
- Enter email address in email address filed (name@yahoo.com)
- Enter password at password field
- Select MANUAL SETUP not next
- Select IMAP
* username= name@yahoo.com
* password = yourpassword
* IMAP server= imap.mail.yahoo.com
* port = 143
* security = none
* optional = blank
- Select NEXT

You will then be prompted to sign in do so.

Will then be taken to the SMPTP settings which only prompts (going form memory) you for address which is smtp.mobile.mail.yahoo.com. leave the port as is. Then select NEXT. Sign in. Name your account and that’s it.

If you have any questions or comments please leave them on the comment section. Special thanks to: JRSCCivic98 and to muddy00 from Crackberry.