Setting up a POP3 or IMAP account ......

Do you mean Mail? It's coming with the OS and not iLife.

Yahoo has help section with information regarding the proper POP3 and IMAP settings. Look there for help, as I currently can't recall the proper servers.

Hotmail should have one too.

The addresses you tried are for the webmail account and not the actual POP3 or IMAP servers.

If you can't find anything on the proper pages (Yahoo help or Hotmail help), which I doubt, you can always use a search engine like Yahoo or Google to look for them.

I myself used Yahoo mail, but only POP3 was allowed. Now I let my Google Mail fetch the Yahoo mail, and Mail (the software) uses the IMAP server for my Google Mail.


PS: This is quite old (2006), but maybe it helps.

 

The Mail program on your Mac can handle both POP and IMAP.

It's up to whomever is hosting your email as to which protocols that they support.

IMO, if you have the choice between POP or IMAP, go with IMAP.

In the US, Hotmail doesn't provide access via either of those industry standard protocols (which really sucks). As a workaround, there's a thread on here that can show you how to have your Hotmail account forward email to a gmail account, and like spinnerlys noted, gmail works great with the Mac's Mail program.

 

It's your decision. Personally, that's what I do (forward everything to my gmail account). I love gmails spam filtering and I find their webmail interface to be sooo much faster than other services. But that's just me.

The downside to forwarding your accounts to your gmail is that when you respond to an email, it uses your gmail email address as the return email address on the reply you send.

That's not a big deal for me, but it really bothers some people. If it bothers you, then you might want to look into having the Mail program on your Mac directly connect to your Yahoo mail (using POP or IMAP .. Mail has no problems working with multiple accounts). In the US, you have to pay Yahoo something like $20/year to be able to do, but I know that Yahoo's rules in Europe are different.

 

You can set gmail and mail to have a different "reply to" address. Only outlook shows the gmail address; other email programs hide the fact that it came from gmail (although you can find out if you know where to look).

 

Can you do that in Mail if you don't have that email account setup in Mail?

i.e. can you setup a reply address in Mail of your Hotmail address?