Using Outlook Express with Yahoo! and Hotmail free accounts

I have a Yahoo! free account, but I hate to go to their web page and see the advertisements each time I want to check mail. Everytime I want to check and see the new mails, I have to type in www.yahoo.com in my browser, enter my user name and password, click sign-in, then I have to goto Inbox; all this while Yahoo keeps irritating me, wasting my precious bandwidth with its banner size advertisements.

I always wanted to have the ease of receiving my incoming mails from Yahoo! using Outlook Express or similar mail client. However, Yahoo! as well as Hotmail does not provide POP3 facility for free accounts.

With some tricks, I did manage to get it working -- all without spending a single penny :). I hope this article will help you if you would like to achieve the same.

5 good reasons why using a POP3 client is better with Yahoo! and Hotmail:

• You don't have to log onto their website each time you want to check mail, it just takes only seconds to connect and download all messages with your mail client -- reducing your internet bills and online time if you are a dial-up user.
• You don't have to type in your user name and password each time. You can stop worrying about key loggers and spoofed web pages that mimic Yahoo's home page to steal your passwords.
  
• You don't have to connect to internet every time you want to read a mail, all your mails are stored on your hard disk and stays with you everywhere you go. Even while you're on vacation and internet is not available.
  
• You don't have to distract or annoy yourself with banner and A4 sized advertisements.
• You can even have your mail client to check mails every n minutes, so that all new mails are downloaded to your PC automatically ready for you to read.
  

Ready to go? Then read on the following to get this done. Its quick and easy!

First of all, we need to create a free email account from www.cashette.com. Cashette is spam controlled email, where we can 'name our price for spam'. However, a cashette email account has the nice feature that it can pull emails from external email accounts.

To see a list of supported email accounts by Cashette, click here.

So here's a brief outline what we need to do to receive Yahoo!, Hotmail, AOL, MSN emails via POP3 to your Outlook Express:

1. Get a free email account from www.cashette.com
2. Setup your Yahoo! or Hotmail email accounts as external mails in Cashette.
3. Verify the email accounts
4. Setup Outlook Express to receive email from Cashette's POP3 server.

That's it. If you understood the steps and know how to do the same, you can skip the rest of the information this page. Else, read on. I'll provide you step by step information and screen shots to guide you through the process.

Step 1: Sign up a free email account from Cashette

• Log onto www.cashette.com
  
  
  
• Click Open a Free Account button and the registration form appears. Enter your details. For existing email address box, you may enter your Yahoo! or Hotmail email address. It will automatically come up in the external mail section.
  
  
  Enter a desired user name and password for your Cashette account. Remember, this is the address we'll be configuring our mail client with. So keep a note of it.
  
• Get past this step and you'll be presented with a profile update page, you may click the Skip button if you want to do it later.
• As the last step, you'll be presented a couple offers, but of course the 'No Thanks' button is there.
  
• Congratulations, you now have a free Cashette account. Picture below shows the inbox I received after signing up. Click the Setup external Mail link (marked with red).
  
  

Step 2: Setup external mail accounts in Cashette

• Below is a screen shot of the external mail setup screen -- my Yahoo! address, given at the time of registration is automatically displayed by default. Additional addresses can be entered using the add external email address button just below the table.
  
  
  
• Now that we have our Yahoo! email address setup as an external account, we need to verify it. Click the Verify link at the right end of the line and it will send a verification email to your Yahoo account. Now you need to login to your Yahoo mail box, and click the verification link in the mail sent by Cashette.
  
  If you don't find the mail in Inbox, check in Junk. Most of the times I find Yahoo's spam filter quite good, I can almost rename Junk as Inbox vice versa!
• Now comes the final part, you need to enable the 'Consolidate & Stop Spam' feature for this external address. Cashette will periodically fetch new mails from your external mail's inbox to Cashette's. Click the Enable link for the external email address of choice, below the Consolidate & Stop Spam column.
  
  Click Agree button to the Spam Control Agreement that is shown next.
• In the Setup Spam Control for external email address screen,
  
  select All Others (Incl. basic Yahoo) for Server Type.
  Enter your external email address password in the Password field, and
  
  
  Click Save. Cashette will verify by connecting to your Yahoo account and trying to download existing mails in it.
  
  Voila! Cashette has successfully connected and downloaded your existing messages, and will continue to do so periodically, every 30 minutes. You don't have to sign in to your Yahoo account to check mails anymore.

Step 3: Configure your mail client

• Now you need to configure your mail client to receive mails from Cashette via POP3.
  
  Cashette's POP3 server is: mail.cashette.com
  

  You can see it by clicking My Account on top menu and then Mail program settings (SMTP & POP3).
  

• Open Outlook Express
  (Start > Programs > Outlook Express in Windows XP)
• Select Accounts from Tools menu. The account settings box appears. Click Add button on the top right and select Mail from it.
• Enter your full name in the Display Name and click Next. Enter your full cashette email address (username@cashette.com) in the Email address box and Click Next again.
• For the incoming POP3 server, enter mail.cashette.com. Type in anything you like for the Outgoing mail server (Cashette does not provide an SMTP server, nor Yahoo!. If you have an SMTP server address, you can enter it here). Click Next.
• For account name, enter your Cashette email address. (username@cashette.com) and enter your password in the Password field. Check remember password to prevent Outlook Express from asking it everytime. Click Next once and then Finish on the next screen.
  

Congratulations. You're now ready to receive mails. Click the Send/Receive button on the toolbar, and there you are. Outook Express fetches your Yahoo! mails from your Cashette account via POP3. Good luck!

Shell script to recover ADSL passwords

The following shell script will assist you in recovering an ADSL user name - password pair stored in an ADSL router. The script was tested to run on Knoppix 3.2 and 4.0 and should work on other distros as well. However, the devices that can be used with the script, I leave it for you to experiment with :)

Just copy the script to any file, lets say adsl.sh in your $HOME directory, then execute the following commands to run the script (i.e., give it execute permissions and run it!).

$ chmod +x $HOME/adsl.sh
$ $HOME/adsl.sh ipaddress username password

(If you are already in your home directory, just use chmod +x adsl.sh followed by ./adsl.sh)

The parameters of the script are,

ipaddress - Ip address of the router
username - Router configuration user name
password - Router configuration password

For example,

$ $HOME/adsl.sh 192.168.1.1 admin mypass

(where admin and mypass are the router user name and passwords respectively)

If in case you don't know the user name and password of the router configuration, then look it up in the manual pages of the router. The default values for user name and password for most routers are both 'admin'. So try your luck!

That's it. The script will try to download the configuration and match the lines with user name and password in it.

Enough story, here follows the shell script.

# ADSL Router Password Recovery Shell Script
#
# Copyright (c) 2006 by Ubercoder.
# www.ubercoder.blogspot.com
#
# Freely (re)distributable.


echo "adslpwd Shell-script by ubercoder, www.ubercoder.blogspot.com"
echo ""

echo "#!/usr/bin/expect

spawn telnet $1

expect {*ogin:}
send \"$2\r\"

expect {*sword:}
send \"$3\r\"

expect {*\-\>*}
send \"console enable\r\"

expect {*antum*}
send \"fm\r\"

expect {*antum*fm*}
send \"cat im.conf\r\"

expect {\#\send}
send \"home\r\"

expect {*antum*}
send \"exit\r\"

expect {*\-\>*}

send \"user logout\r\"

" > /tmp/adsl_tmp.sh

chmod +x /tmp/adsl_tmp.sh

echo "Downloading configuration..."
/tmp/adsl_tmp.sh > /tmp/adsl_tmp.tmp

echo "Done."
echo ""
set `cat /tmp/adsl_tmp.tmp | grep weLoginName`
echo "Username: $3"
set `cat /tmp/adsl_tmp.tmp | grep weLoginPassword`
echo "Password: $3"

If the script proved helpful to you, please do post the manufacturer and model name of the router, as well as the name of the ISP if possible, as a comment to this post. It will be helpful for other users. Thanks!

Recovering ADSL passwords

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