VulcanTourist, you have part of the education you requested.
Two main reasons, 1) The POP protocol allows access (under its rules) only and exclusively to the Inbox on the server and not to any custom folders. The Webmail extensions provide access to custom folders on Hotmail and Yahoo. 2) There are some users (particularly those behind corporate firewalls) who are denied access to the ports that some services (Hotmail, GMail) require to access their mail servers. Such users denied this access are frequently (indeed almost always) permitted to access port 80 for http access to their email which is very handily converted by the Webmail add-ons to the POP protocol required by Thunderbird. However, to add some support to your thoughts: One of the main reasons I had continued to use the Yahoo add-on was that Yahoo made it pretty well impossible to avoid spam filtering. Their spam filtering was certainly not the best and messages I wanted to see ended up in the junk folder. The Webmail Yahoo add-on allowed me to access this folder when I read my Yahoo mail into Thunderbird. I am a US resident and, as others have commented, Yahoo for a long time did not permit POP/SMTP access to US users of Yahoo without paying for it. Some time ago I followed the advice from some other users and changed the "location" of my account in Yahoo to Yahoo Asia. I then found I had the option to permit POP access to my Yahoo account. I tested it, it worked, but I did not keep it for the reason of access to the Junk folder reported above. In the last couple of weeks, after the most recent changes to Yahoo mail, I switched the "location" of my Yahoo account back to the US. I was surprised to find that I still had the option of permitting POP access to my Yahoo account. Not only that but the latest Yahoo interface gave me the option of having not just my Inbox accessed via POP but also the contents of the Junk mail folder as well. For many US Yahoo users I would imagine that this combination would be sufficient for them to take he option of the tried and true POP mail facility over the Webmail add-on. If SMTP access is available then it is generally preferable over the website mail sending and the imitation of it by the Webmail add-ons. I have explained above why these add-ons still provide a valuable service to some users. I think that the population needing them has decreased but I remain entirely thankful to the Webmail Author for the long-standing efforts to provide and maintain these add-ons for the community that rely upon their availability. On Jul 3, 5:12 pm, ethaNoL <[email protected]> wrote: > You can't get your junk mail or sent mail with only POP, so you still > have to login to the web site to see if you are missing any messages > in the junk folder. > > > > > > > > On Monday, 4 July 2011 00:41:57 UTC+10, VulcanTourist wrote: > > > Since GMail, HotMail, and Yahoo already support POP3 delivery > > internally, and accounts for those services can be configured as POP3 > > in Thunderbird with the publicly available servers for each, exactly > > when and why would these extensions ever be needed for those services > > in particular? It seems that this adds an unnecessary level of > > complexity, since HTTP is not an e-mail protocol and changes to how > > the "Webmail" interfaces work could break these extensions, which > > NEVER happens with POP3/SMTP. > > > When are these actually needed?
