OK, so I should have found this years ago - it’s been a issue that’s been the bane of my life for a long while, but like all these things, you just accept the solutions you develop and forget that you are living with a problem that still needs addressing.

The difficulty I’ve been having for years is that as a heavy Yahoo! Mail user (all I can say it don’t knock it until you’ve tried it) it means that any time you click an email link on a webpage it tries to load your default mail application - usually Mail. Because Yahoo! Mail doesn’t support IMAP (because they want you to use Zimbra Desktop to access your mail if you want to do it from the desktop) it means that the occasional and accidental click of an email link just starts loading all sorts of Mail related windows that are simply useless.

Firefox realised this was a problem for people who prefer or who are forced into using web based mail products and introduced an option in their own preferences recently, but Safari - my primary browser - has never tackled this successfully.

The answer is actually a very old one.

There is a program out there called Yahoo! Mailer. It’s a tiny app, weighing in at a crushingly small 68Kb - and which, despite my initial skepticism, runs happily on Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) despite not having been updated since 2006.

All you need to do is download it, and set it as your default email app in Mail’s preferences. It will then delegate all emails to your Yahoo! Mail account using your default browser. Bingo!

Download Yahoo! Mailer and save yourself from the pain of using web based email on Macs (also configurable for use with Hotmail and Gmail).

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