So instead of connecting to Yahoo!, your e-mail program connects to YPOPs, which in turn logs on to your Yahoo! Mail account without launching a web browser, reads your mailbox and translates the contents to POP3 mail.
When launched, YPOPs takes up about 5.2MB of RAM and just sits unobtrusively in the system tray; even its icon can be turned off — YPOPs has a "hide tray icon" option.
YPOPs doesn't have a progress bar or animated icon, so you can only find out if it is working by checking your e-mail program's status box (see image).
The YPOPs webpage has guides on how to set up the program to work with most major e-mail programs.
This basically involves setting your POP3 server to 127.0.0.1 or Localhost instead of Yahoo!'s servers.
The program has a multitude of configuration options (see image).
For example, you can choose to delete downloaded mail off the Yahoo! server (or not), download bulk mail (spam), or download mail only from specific folders, plus YPOPs also has support for web proxies.
In one week of testing, YPOPs retrieved hundreds of messages off my Yahoo! account, some with large attachments.
Impressively, YPOPs can also send e-mail through your Yahoo! Mail account, in effect, acting as an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) proxy.
It even provides the option to save sent mail in your Yahoo! Mail "Sent Items" folder.
